subject: How To Win Clients And Then Irritate Them [print this page] How To Win Clients And Then Irritate Them
So you have setup a new company. The easiest bit was setting up the company formations. You have your company name, a funky brand and an all singing all dancing website. That's dealt with the easy part of UK company formations. Now let us move onto the harder parts of running a company. The biggest part, is finding lots of customers. Once you have the customers through the door, you have an even harder job. Now is time to keep hold of them. Businesses that have a high customer retention rate, tend to be very successful. The last thing you want is to lose your client base to your competitors because your product or service isn't up to scratch. So how do you make sure you don't lose customers unneccessarily? Luckily while there might be a hundred and one ways of doing so, there are only really a few main reasons companies lose their customers. Here are the top reasons. My worse pet hate is companies that say they are going to do something, and then don't deliver. To illustrate how not to treat a a customer, I am going to give you a simple example, which I've experienced as I am writing. In the long run of things, the company has hardly commited a cardinal sin. Fortunately when I don't have Internet, I see it as a hint that I should be socialising a bit more! However some customers aren't so cool, and will go up like a bottle of pop with the slightest provocation. A lack of Internet connection is why I am writing right now. This isn't neccessarily the fault of my provider- it is my fault for losing my login information. I called the company yesterday to confirm the details. Unfortunately the portal that hosts the details was unavailable, but they would get back to me within an hour with the information I needed. I was quite impressed they were making the effort to manually get the details for me. Better still, they actually called ten minutes later with the details. Brilliant! Unfortunately I wrote the details down on a piece of paper which a family member decided to bin, so I had to call back again right now. Having called again, I was informed I'd be contacted within 15 minutes. After an hour, I chased them only to be given the same line. What irritated me is that I had been told fifteen minutes. What is the lesson to be had here? If you tell your customer you are going to do something, do it. If the situation changes, inform them. If the company had phoned to apologise after 15 minutes, and inform me that I'd need to wait a day, I'd have been cool with that. I actually ended up getting very irritated with them as they repeated the excuse a further two times. This also teaches us about setting reasonable expecations and exceeding them. If the company had informed me apologetically I'd have to wait a day, I'd have been fine. If they had then fixed the problem quicker than that, I'd have been happy. For the want of a better example, this is why McDonalds are so incredibly successful. You know what to expect everytime you eat a Big Mac. Everything is covered in the McDonalds handbook, from how to cook the burger to how much lettuce to add. This way there's no room for error. It's not like when you visit a restaurant one evening and the food is magnificent. Then another time you visit and because they are busy, you feel cheated out of your money. Make sure you set expectations at a reasonable level, and try and beat them. Next fall below expectations. On the flip side (no burger pun intended) a final word of warning is that you cannot please everyone. There are some customers that literally get off on causing bother and feeling important. These people go through life inflicting pain on customer service! I can tell you having run companies with fantastic and not so great customer service, you cannot help everyone. You will find customers that break everything and then blame you. Don't waste your time on the problematic ones- follow the advice above and put a smile on the face of the customers that deserve it.
