Are you having trouble figuring out what the customer wants? Do you need tips for good customer service?
Exceptional customer service is so crucial for business success. In Excellence Wins, Horst Schulze examines some specific tips that all employees can follow to deliver world-class service experiences.
Let’s look at Schulze’s great customer service tips below.
Tip #1: Fulfill Basic Customer Desires
Building customer loyalty is all about going above and beyond to create the ideal customer experience. But how? According to Schulze, there are three things that all customers desire, and employees should focus on fulfilling these desires with Schulze’s great customer service tips.
1) Customers want your product or service to be free of functional flaws; it should do everything they need it to do. For instance, if you run a massage parlor, your customers should feel completely relaxed and pain-free by the end of their massage.
2) Customers want to be served as quickly as possible. Slow service is enough to ruin a customer’s experience even if it’s otherwise positive.
3) Customers want to receive your product or service from someone who seems like they genuinely care about their feelings, argues Schulze. He stresses that this third factor—personal care—often matters most of all in creating customer loyalty. If your employees make the customer feel valued and welcomed, it sets a positive tone that can make up for potential mistakes or flaws. For example, suppose workers at a hardware store remember a customer’s name and the products they usually buy. In that case, the customer will have an exceptional experience even if the store doesn’t have everything they need in stock.
Tip #2: Discover Your Customers’ Unique Desires
Schulze notes that beyond the three basic desires, each customer has a unique set of wants and needs. Employees should ask customers what they can do to help, then listen carefully to try and understand what they want, even if the customers struggle to communicate it. Their true desires may not be exactly what they say they are. For example, imagine a customer comes into an electronics store asking about a specific TV model. After talking to them, the employee realizes that what they really want is a large screen with great picture quality for their living room home theater setup. The employee guesses that a projector would better suit their needs and recommends that the customer buy one of those instead.
To please your average customer as much as possible, you’ll have to conduct research. Schulze advises gathering extensive customer feedback through recurring surveys. Then, use this data to tailor your product or service accordingly.
Tip #3: Earn Trust by Handling Complaints Well
Schulze views customer complaints as opportunities to build loyalty and trust. When you successfully resolve an issue and demonstrate a commitment to customer satisfaction, you can transform a customer’s negative experience into a positive one. This can result in stronger customer loyalty than if the problem had never occurred.
Schulze says that when a customer has a complaint about your product or service, what they want more than anything else is to see that your company cares about the problems they’re facing. Employees should actively listen to the customer’s complaint and validate their emotions. Conversely, they should avoid using dismissive body language, speaking in an unsympathetic tone of voice, or downplaying the issue.
On a broader scale, Schulze notes that employees should analyze customer problems to uncover their true, often multi-layered root causes—even if the initial cause seems obvious on the surface. For example, imagine a restaurant customer complains that their food took too long to arrive. Instead of just blaming the cooks for taking too long, employees should investigate deeper—was it an issue with the kitchen being understaffed or undertrained? Or, perhaps the kitchen is organized in a suboptimal way, forcing the cooks to spend time moving from station to station?
