Every time we go to a store, eat at a restaurant or call about a bill, we are either entering “Consumer Arena of Service Heaven” or “Service Hell,” braced for battle, brimming with expectations, hoping for service excellence, but more often than not, we end up receiving something closer to service abandonment instead–where the idea of meeting the customer’s expectations with quality service has simply been abandoned.
If your employees are delivering poor service in your store, don’t underestimate how your customers feel about it. After all, what do you do about bad service? Surveys tell us most customers “vote” on it with their feet. They patronize someone else and never let the offending business know why. Can you blame them? Plus statistics show they’ll tell six to 12 other people about it. Those 12 tell six others. Those six others tell three more each! That’s 300 people who’ll hear about that bad service experience from a friend.
So you may have lost a potential 300 new customers by making one customer angry enough not to come back and to tell a dozen of his or her friends not to either. What if training your employees significantly reduces or eliminates the chances of poor or indifferent service, and therefore reduces the odds of people complaining about it to their friends?
To improve your performance and profits, remember these three things:
- Bad service happens all by itself, good service has to be managed.
- Good service starts with training.
- Listen to your customers and then DO what they tell you to do.
More Business Competition Insight
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