Superior Customer Service should be the main concern for all small businesses. However, most Small Businesses fall far short of this. If you meet the customer’s perception when they visit your business is that good customer service? No, it is average customer service. You must not only meet but exceed their expectation on visiting your small business. Nearly half of all shoppers avoid specific small businesses after a bad experience. Companies should be committed to customer satisfaction first then to products and services.

There is a circle of superior customer service. If you have excellent service, the customers love the small business. Since they love your small business, they spend money. Once they spend money they are treated better and keep coming back. Thus, the circle of superior customer lives.

Customers should be treated as guests in your home. The goal is to create customers for life. One of the advantages of a Small Business is the personal relations with its customers. Greeting every shopper and thanking them when leaving or making a purchase is required.  Listen to the customers and see how you can help them with their needs. Most customers are looking at how you can help them solve a need or want. They do not care how it benefits you.

Customers get upset when they can not find employees. Even worst, the employees are talking to one another instead of assisting the customers in the small business. Listening to employees personal phone calls irritates many customers also. If the employees are speaking in a different language in front of a customer, many will assume they are talking about them. There is perhaps nothing worst hearing employees talk negative about other customers or the customers think they are being discussed in another language.

Customer Service also applies to having the product and or services your customer is looking for. It also involves interaction with the business, employees and how satisfied with the process. Clean restrooms are important to the customer. If you do not allow customers to use your restroom, that is a huge negative to your business.

Some of the obstacles to superior customer service are as follows:

Attitude that customers are replaceable  

Insensitive employees and or management 

Lack of commitment 

Lack of listening 

Inconsistency 

It is easy to counter these obstacles by proper selection and education of employees. The small business employees and management must show empathy, reliability, responsive, credible and make things easy for the customer instead of the small business. Many small business policies are done for the benefit of the small business and not to increase customer satisfaction.

Customer complaints are never easy to hear. The biggest problems with customer service are that with an unhappy customer. Make it easy for customers to complain. The number one reason customers stop visiting a small business is because of apathy. Most customers just stop shopping your small business instead of complaining to get the problem resolved.  Yes, you will listen to some bogus complaints. About 1/3 of all serious problems are created by the customer. How you handle these complaints will determined, if you keep these profitable customers for a lifetime.

 If we shift from being defensive to opportunistic, complaints can   be an opportunity to fix a weakness. You can gain more positive exposure by solving their problem than with the satisfied customer. In fact, an unhappy customer who has their issue resolved favorably will tell twice as many people about the positive experience as compared with the negative experience. It does not matter who created the problem, your goal is to resolve the issue and make the customer happy.

The customer may want less than you were going to offer. You could just ask the customer how they would like this resolved. If it is reasonable, you should go with it. By listening carefully, we can identify opportunities for training employees and improving the small business operation. This will keep your customer service as a strength.

All employees must be able to handle basic complaints. Feel free to read our articles on customer service. We will add more articles regularly.