The customer service mentality should permeate your entire organization. What is your commitment to customers? Does everybody in the company understand this commitment inside and out? Do you provide exemplary service? Friendly service? Accessible service? The service goal of online retailer Zappos is “Delivering happiness.” Define yours and carry through on it every step of the way. Ask yourself these questions to frame it:
- What is our customer service plan (what do we stand for)?
- Why is it important?
- Who is responsible for it?
- How will it get done?
- How will it be measured?
- How will we celebrate our customer service successes?
Tape the following motto to your wall or use it as a sign-off on your e-mails:
“Everything we do is to help our customers compete more effectively and win in their marketplace.”
Also, create your own statement about what you want to make happen for your customers and then offer some extra-valued or even “free” perks related to it. Based on the statement “I want to allow distributors to win an all-expense-paid trip to the company’s home base if they bring us X amount of business in a quarter,” you could sign the distributors up for your company newsletter, feature them on your blog, produce a monthly newsletter offering them tips on how to use your product or service in ways they didn’t think of, and direct them to where they should go for reorders.
Tip: Use your existing customers to gain new ones. The shortcut to achieving that type of growth is to ask. If you’ve done a good job with your service, a customer will be more likely to give you leads on new customers. Referrals are potent opportunities to move fast on getting new customers, provided you do everything just right as outlined here.
The above is an excerpt from Laurel Delaney’s book, “Exporting: The Definitive Guide to Selling Abroad Profitably,” published by Apress (2016).
There are more than 8 billion potential customers in the world looking for your product or service. Are you ready to serve them?