Good customer service is the lifeblood of any business. You can offer promotions and slash prices to bring in as many new customers as you want, but unless you can get some of those customers to come back, your business won’t be profitable for long.

Good customer service is all about bringing customers back. It’s all about sending them away happy enough to pass positive feedback about your business along to others, who may then try the product or service you offer for themselves and in turn become repeat customers.

If you’re a good salesperson, you can sell anything to anyone once. But, it will be your approach to customer service that determines whether or not you’ll ever be able to sell that person anything else. The essence of good customer service is forming a relationship with customers – a relationship that the individual customer feels that he would like to pursue.

How do you go about forming such a relationship?

Remember the one true secret of good customer service and act accordingly:

“You will be judged by what you do, not what you say”.

Providing good customer service and building better customer relationships is a simple thing.

My 15 Tips:

1. Listen and reflect back to the comments and questions.
2. Be impeccable with your word.
3. Under promise, over deliver – provide more value than you receive
   in payment.
4. Always be connecting and networking – suggest new friends to people who can help them grow their business or solve their problems.
5. Give compliments and referrals – even to a competitor if they can do a better job helping the customer.
6. Ditch the Pitch – strive to connect and engage – always be Serving, NOT Selling.
7. Nurture your connections – keep notes if necessary on what is going on in their personal life.
8. A huge mistake made by many in Twitter is setting up your account, and start blasting your promotional messages.
9. My strong suggestion is that you have to earn the right to ask them
   to invest in you.
10. Do NOT sell anything until you have 2K followers and tweets.
11. Just like NPR and PBS they offer high quality programs 24/7/365, and have earned the right to ask for donations during telethons. We don’t mind it because of the value they have already shared with us.
12. You have to invest before you can start collecting the dividends.
13. You can’t go into a bank and open an account with the bare minimum, and turn around and expect to get a big loan without any collateral.
14. Give valuable content that enriches the lives of your audience and customers.
15. Build that ‘know, like and trust relationship’ needed to help them make their decision to spend their money with you.

My BIZ BOOSTER TIP: Giving builds Better Business, both on and off line.

Tweet me @GaryLoper and let me know how this tip works for you or reply to this blog.