Mine Your Own Business

Tough Customers

No matter how your employees and your business in general focuses on customer service, every small business owner has faced a less then contented customer (sometimes that is putting it mildly). Maybe the problem is they think they found a better deal at a big box store, or they had a problem with your product after only six years of extensive use, or they can't purchase bags for the vacuum cleaner you sold them at Wally World, etc. The question is how do you deal with such a customer? The natural urge is to fight back, but a recent article at Bloomberg Business Week presents some different approaches.

• Listen up.
• Pace yourself.
• Take the lead.

Try the techniques mentioned in the article the next time you face a difficult or combative customer (sadly to say you'll probably get a chance far too soon), or do you have some suggestions you've had success with in the past?

Is the Customer Always Right?

First some history on the famous phrase the customer is always right. In the USA it seems to have more or less originated with Marshall Field's department store in Chicago. If you have time you can read more about the the history of this famous phrase here. But is the customer really always right? An article by a small business owner makes the case that the customer isn't always right and some ask too much from your business.

The article gives three instances of their business trying to satisfy customers. In the first exampe they went the extra mile to the mutual benefit of both the business and the customer. In the second example they communicated to the customer some of the problems they were experiencing with satifying the customer and eventually everything again worked out for both the business and the customer.

The third example is similar to the first in that they went the extra mile to satisfy the customer and then the customer gave the business to someone else. Think of the situation where the customer comes in to your store for some information on your product or service and then goes elsewhere to buy it, either at another local store or even worse, online. Do you have any  examples from your business where the customer wasn't right?

Business and Customer Service

Small business owners understand the importance of good customer service (if not they are probably not small business owners for very long). We understand how important it is at Mine Your Own business since we have done around twenty posts on it in 2009 and 2010. Maybe even more telling is that many of the posts are some of our better posts (at least in our opinion). Bloomberg Businessweek reported on a recent survey that found that consumers also feel that good customer service is very important. It describes how 60 percent of respondents to the survey felt great customer service was important, but only one-third felt they are getting it.

The article then provides some of the reasons business owners are letting their customers down, such as maybe being short staffed due to the current economic times or focusing on other things such as pricing. The posting then gives some possible ideas for improving customer service, such as using SuggestionBox or IdeaScale to get online feedback. I know that even when I plan to purchase something locally, I'll go to Amazon or use some other Internet resource to get the opinions of actual purchasers of the product I'm interested in.

There are a lot more good suggestions in the article for improving customer service so the whole arricle is worh a visit. One of the last points the article makes is that if you use a tool like SuggestionBox or see some negative comments about your business somewhere else on the Internet, it  is very important to post how you've corrected the situation. This might turn an unhappy customer into a happy customer and show to other consumers that you really are concerned with good customer service.

 

Nickelodeon and Entrepreneurship

Sometimes entrepreneurs can learn some valuable lessons from rather unusual sources. There was the recent posting  in Mine Your Own Business describing how the Seven Dwarfs from Snow White could illustrate several productivity killers in your business. Now comes another unusual source in What You Can Learn About Entrepreneurship From SpongeBob Squarepants. My kids are too old to have grown up with SpongeBob, so I did a little research and found out that it is Nickelodeon's top rated show.

The article begins by describing an episode of SpongeBob Squarepants where SpongeBob and Patrick decide to start a business selling candy bars to get rich (there is a funny video clip from the episode showing how they get the idea in the first place). The article than describes all the mistakes they make such as not listening to potential customers, bad packaging, and budgeting - to name a few.

All the examples are good lessons for entrepreneurs, but one that made me really think of an example of bad packaging was some experiences I've had with purchasing electronic goods in the dreaded clam shell packaging. You know, the packaging that is almost impossible to open without  sustaining injuries to your hands. I recently heard that Amazon.com has been listening to complaints and has come out with their Frustration-free Packaging. Something to think about if your business has any control of the packaging of your product.

New Employee Training

As the economy starts to improve, most small businesses will eventually hire new employees as their business grows. It is crucial for the employee to be trained effectively both so the employee can grow in their job over time and to maximize their contribution to your business. So how do you accomplish this complicated and difficult task? Here is a great article that provides nine tips for training that new employee. While all the tips in the article are very good, five of them are especially applicable to a small business as opposed to a larger business or corporation. 

• Remind new employees why they were hired.
• Always explain "why".
• Blend in customer service.
• Encourage personality.
• Inspect what you expect.

Of the five points above, I thought two of them would be especially helpful in training new employees and were something I had never really considered before. The two points were Always explain "why", and Blend in customer service. The article makes the point that by combining job skills and customer service during the training process, there will never be any question in the employee's mind of which is more important.

Make a Customer Feel Special

Today's post will be a little different than most of our posts, since we usually link to another article. Today we are going to start out with a quote and give two examples of making customers feel special. Here's the quote:

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

--Maya Angelou,
American writer

Now for two examples of putting this quote into practice.

“I was in a Cricket telephone store with my brother last week.  He was getting a new cell phone when his old one got lost when it fell out of his pocket on the bus.  He didn’t mention this to the store owner until after he had paid for the new phone.  The store owner reached over to a display rack, took down a plastic cell phone holster and told him that maybe that would help.  No charge.  A very inexpensive way to make a customer feel special.” 

Bill Hinderer

I was on vacation in Florida for the last two weeks and one restaurant we have visited almost every year for the past fourteen years is Johny Leverock's Seafood House in Placida Florida. The food and service is always excellent, it has a great view of a marina, and it is locally owned. We were in a fairly large group of family and friends when we visited them one evening for dinner, but there was a very large group that arrived just before us and the service was slower than usual.

Here is how the waitress made our group feel special. She brought us two free appetizers after taking our orders, without us even requesting them. The two orders of crab cakes were excellent (we'd never tried them there before) and it made the wait much more tolerable. She turned what could have been hungry and cranky customers into very satisfied customers and our friends who had never eaten there were very impressed.

So do you have an example of ways some business has made you feel special or perhaps something you have used in your business to salvage a bad situation or make a customer feel special?

Baker's Dozen

Ever wonder where the term Baker's Dozen comes from? There was an interesting post on small business and the Baker's Dozen (which I'll get to later), but I got curious on more of the background on the Baker's Dozen, did some research on the Internet, and and here is what Wikipedia reports on the history of the Baker's Dozen.

The point of the article is to give your customer a little bit extra, go above and beyond to satisfy their normal expectations, and even delight your customers (more to follow on that later). In the meantime here is a past post from Mine Your Own Business on exceeding your customer's expectations and a link to the article.

Store Appearance

We do a lot of postings on customer service, if you're curious about how many just click on the link to all of our Customer Service postings on the right hand side of this page under Categories. We do more postings in Sales and Salesmanship and General Business, but customer service still has a huge impact on any business. We ran across this article in USA Today that made the point that "aesthetics is a part of customer service" and is very important to the success of your business along with quality service and reasonable pricing.

The article provides a couple of examples of businesses that are losing customers because they aren't paying enough attention to this aspect of customer service, so how can an owner address this issue. Next time you walk into your place of business try to step back and take an objective look at your business. Is it clean, well lit, and generally attractive. Better yet, ask your employees and some of your regular customers if they have any suggestions (or if you are married, your husband or wife). You might get some great free advice. A last point, if you like this article there is a link to other postings by Gladys Edmunds' columns at the bottom of the page.

For the Birds

Feeding wild birds is very popular in the United States, according to Wikipedia over 55 million Americans are active bird feeders out of a U.S. population of 309,257,847 (I got that figure from the U.S. Census Bureau Web site). I did the math and that is almost 18 per cent of the American population. So how does this relate to small business? We'll get to that a little later in the posting, but an article in the New York Times, How Do you Keep Them Coming Back, presented some great ideas on getting customers to return that will relate to the bird statistics above. The whole article is worth reading but the examples of how two coffee shops get repeat business made me think of a local business that I frequent. One coffee shop has a frequent sippers reward card that they keep on file at the store and the second provides very personal customer service.

Now for the link to feeding wild birds and repeat customers, but first a little background. I have two bird feeders that I keep filled year round and a bird bath. Winters can be nasty here in the Midwest, so I even have a heater so the birds (and squirrels) have water even in the dead of winter. I buy most of my birdseed from a local, privately owned garden shop for the same reasons mentioned above about the coffee shops. They have a card for me at the store and when I buy 10 bags of seed I get the next one free (an $18 value). I also get excellent customer service, they even carry the bag out and load it in my car.

There is actually a third reason as well, it is simply better quality than I can get at my local grocery store. It has a more expensive blend of seed that appeals to more birds. It could be my imagination, but when I get busy and sometimes fill my feeders with grocery store feed, I don't seem to have near as many birds and I think they get excited when I put the "good stuff" in.

Now for something to see if we can get you coming back to our blog. We'll give a free prize to the first 10 people who post a comment to this article, any takers? By the way, a comment of simply what is the prize does not count.

Customers as Lifetime Investments

While it finally appears that the economy is improving for many of us, last year was extremely difficult for most small businesses. We ran across this article Treat Your Customers Like Lifetime Investments that describes how one bicycle retailer increased their revenues by 20 percent. It was probably not due to the fact that people couldn't afford gas, instead the article makes the point that the following four customer service tips were actually responsible.

1. Focus on customer relationships, not one-time transactions.
2. Give your employees permission to do whatever it takes to keep customers satisfied.
3. Make every customer interaction fun, informative, and positive.
4. Stand by your product with service and price guarantees.

You can read the entire article on how these tips were put into practice and some of them might not work for your business, but a 20 percent increase in revenues is pretty impressive. The comments after the article are informative as well and one in particular commented on something we've posted about before, the importance of Customer Referrals.