12.5 Words to Deliver Great Customer Service

1. You: The best customer service specialists are positive, helpful and enthusiastic. This is a choice. Once you choose to be the best, customers will return again and again, because everybody wants to do business with the best.
2. Knowledgeable: Know everything you need to know. Know your products. Know your company. Know your competition. Once you master everything you need to know, you will be a trusted resource for customers, co-workers and colleagues.
3. Greet: Address customers by name. Make sure everyone on your team knows the names of the regular customers. This is an easy way for them to feel respected and important… and it is one of the reasons they will be loyal customers
4. Prepare: Be ready for every possible scenario from upset customers to delighted ones.
5. Listen: It is difficult to solve problems or satisfy a need if you don’t even know what is on the customer’s mind. Ask questions and listen. Own the problem. Understand the need.
6. Options: Customers like to make choices. Jeffrey Gitomer says, “Customers don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy.” Once you find out their problems and needs, provide a few options and then recommend the best option for them to succeed.
7. Fun: Have some fun with your customers and co-workers. If you don’t like what you are doing, find something you enjoy. It just doesn’t make sense spending 250 days a year where you are not having fun. Having fun helps build relationships that can definitely lead to customer loyalty.
8. Trust: Companies with the best customer service and customer loyalty have sales specialists that have built a relationship with their customers. Getting to trust is not hard, but it begins with getting to know the customer, then liking each other.
9. Respond: Be positive and enthusiastic. We are paid professionals and should treat everybody the way we wish to be treated.
10. Promise: If you say you are going to do something, then do it. In the unlikely event of missing a deadline, let them know, and keep them posted of progress. They will appreciate being kept informed. It’s part of being professional.
11. Over-deliver: Provide a WOW moment by exceeding expectations. Customers always recognize the extra effort and may even go out of their way to write a positive review and tell their friends of their awesome experience. (There are no traffic jams along the extra mile. ~ Roger Staubach)
12. Appreciate: Thank your customers like you mean it. Too many times we are rushed and barely make the effort. Be grateful. It costs five times more to get a new customer than it does to retain an existing customer. Thank you for your support.

12.5   Smile: It’s another choice. Choose to smile and the whole world smiles with you. Cranky? Down? Irritable? That’s for the competition; you are a trained professional. Smile when you greet the customer. Smile when you say good-bye. Smile all the while.