Your customers are!

Whether you like it or not, your customers are already talking about you, either directly to their friends, or, and of course now much more common, and potentially infinitely more powerful … on the Internet.

The Internet is empowering your customer unlike anything before  … you can either use this fact to your advantage, or let it happen without you. Your challenge is to make sure whatever is being said about you is ‘great’ on an ongoing basis.

It's incredible how much bad customer service can (and will) cost you, and how much great customer service can (and will if you take the right actions) make you. This is a fun exercise you can do with your people to make this point clearly and effectively.

There's much shouting about how 'unfair' Trip Advisor are and how annoying it is to get bad reviews, so I feel compelled to put the record straight. Here goes:

> It's not 'unfair' everyone has the same issues!

> If you get it right it's free worldwide advertising for a little bit of effort, what on earth is anyone moaning about?

I find it mind-bogglingly amazing how Companies get Sales so wrong: they focus on getting new customers, while letting existing customers go elsewhere ... nuts!

Why try and fill up a leaking bucket? Surely it's a better way of doing business to plug the holes first?

Please click on the attached link to see a very good article from the Institute of Customer Service, which includes some alaming facts that every leader and manager should know.

This is so often the case.

I suggest you do more than this if you want to spend time and money on customer feedback (and you MUST do this in 2012 to survive). Here's my short tips:

1. You don't want 'satisfaction' you want 'loyalty' and 'engagement' resulting in repeat sales, up sales and referrals