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Meeting Customer Expectations

What your customers are expected from you and how SOHO entrepreneurs juggle to meet customer expectations.

Author: Kroy Ip

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It's full of twists and turns and never a dull moment in the office, especially for small organizations. There are zillion things going on but only a few of you trying to do everything, dealing with every situation as they occur. However have you try looking at your company from the outside to see what your customers are expected from you?

First and foremost, your customers don't care about your problems. When they want something from you, should that be a product, a service, or assistance of any kind, they want it yesterday and they want it delivered as promised. People don't care about why things didn't happen. They don't care you can't correct the invoice because your bookkeeper was off for a week; and they don't care you can't deliver the goods to their warehouse because your truck needs a new tire. No, all they see is that you failed to provide what you supposed to provide, period. Call this unreasonable if you like but remember, they are your customers, not your friends. The best way to overcome this hurdle is to plan ahead and often. Many time management tools suggest that you should plan and prioritize your to-do items at least once a week, then perform a quick review/adjustment in mid-week. Planning alone won't make your tasks go away, but it sure helps to identify the high-priority items, allowing you to survive your busy days without missing a beat.

Furthermore, a large percentage of your customers are not as much of an expert in your field. In fact most of them have no way to measure the true quality of your product/service. Therefore it is paramount to provide a satisfactory experience pre and post the sale to ensure the quality of the overall experience is to their satisfaction - not just the product/service you provide during the sale. The side benefit of delivering a satisfactory overall experience is that you can easily become the 'go-to' guy, effectively putting your products/services on your customers radar at all time. Not to mention all the referrals you can get from your customers.

Last but not least, it is up to you to manage your customers experience. Make sure you put the right personnel in the right place especially for the frontline staffs, otherwise you are just setting them up to kill your brand and reputation every time they talk to your customers. To further empower your frontline staffs, use some sort of Sales & Contact Management system to provide the information they need on a timely fashion. The system should at least provide the following information to your frontline staffs:

Customer Contact Information & History
Purchase History
Issues & Complaints History
Sales Potentials & Opportunities

Purchase History is important because you want your frontline staffs to identify your key customers right away; whereas Sales Potentials & Opportunites allows them to up-sell/cross-sell when the right moment comes.

About Author

Kroy Ip is the Sr. Consultant at BTOnline.ca, a Canadian IT company specialized in Hosted Business Solutions such as CRM, Newsletter Marketing and Online Survey. He also designed many OpenSource solutions for clients, including online streaming solutions (for marketing and customer relations purposes), customer survey & membership sign-up systems, online candidates evaluation systems (for recruitment purposes), and online training delivery systems, just to name a few.

Article Source: http://www.1888articles.com/author-kroy-ip-14780.html