Think about what your most important product is. If you own a restaurant, perhaps it’s your bestselling dessert; if you run a retail store, it might be a popular item with a big gross margin; if you operate a computer repair service, it’s surely the skills of your technicians.
While these examples will correlate easiest with your bookkeeping, there’s a product far more important than a dish, item, or skill: it’s your business’s customer service, of course.
So what is customer service? We hear that term bandied about all the time—and you’ll certainly find dozens of blogs on this very website that champion its importance—but what does the term encompass? For many business owners, it’s easy to get stuck on the notion that customer service is the department that deals with problems, but that’s only a fraction of the story.
You should think of customer service as every second of time your customer interacts with your business, from the moment he enters your store to well after he’s left. This includes everything, including how long it takes for him to be greeted by an employee, how your products are displayed, the interaction he has with your salesperson (or server, technician, etc.), and a million other things all the way to how you follow up with him after the purchase. In short, customer service equals the totality of your customer’s experience with your business.
You’ll hear clichés like how certain products sell themselves, but that’s rarely the case in real life. That triple chocolate fudge sundae will appeal to some of your guests on its own, but your server is the one in a position to talk about how delectable it is to convince the rest. And that most-bang-for-your-buck lawnmower needs to be explained to your customers if you want them to take notice before selecting something else. And don’t forget that the point of contact in a repair business needs to be able to diagnose a problem and empathize with an upset consumer before your technician ever cracks open his toolset.
Without excellent customer service, many of those sales will get stopped dead in their tracks long before your actual products come into play—and whether you get repeat business or referrals will greatly depend on what happens after.
Excellent customer service starts with your employees and covers everything from how well they keep your facilities clean to how good they are at interacting with your clientele. You wouldn’t expect a dessert to have never been tasted by your chef, nor would you expect the manufacturer of a lawnmower to have never tested it on grass. And we all know technicians have to be certified before they’re qualified to do a repair, of course. Doesn’t it make sense to test your most important product, your customer service, rather than hoping for the best?
Want to make sure your most important product is at its best? Reach out to us at The Brandt Group, and we’ll work with you to enhance your profits and loyalty through staff development, and we’ll also help you keep an eye on it with our world-class mystery shopping.
