How to Develop a Customer Focus

Focus on the details of how to serve your clients better.

Exemplary customer service is the hallmark of just about every successful business. Addressing and anticipating the needs of your clientele goes a long way towards breeding loyalty and, eventually, profitability. However, using a broad, ham-handed approach can make it difficult to succeed at this, regardless of your best intentions. There needs to be an organized plan. By identifying and implementing a few simple things, you can get your business on the right track towards developing a customer focus.

Instructions

1. Determine what services you want to provide to your customers. Put yourself in their shoes, and ask yourself what you would want if you were to patronize your own business. Write down what you deem to be the cornerstones of excellent customer service, and continue your plan from there.

2. Ask the customers what they want. Surveys are an effective way to do this, whether on site, or via email or paper mail. Compile a database if you don't have one already. This is a list of your most loyal and frequent customers. Many businesses use a VIP or preferred buyer's club for compiling a database. Not only are you hearing what customers want, but you are fostering increased loyalty by letting them know their opinion matters.

3. Train your staff to meet all of your customers' needs. To give them the tools to succeed, inform them of every last detail that they will need to know in order to do their job. One thing that helps is to empower your workers by giving them a small amount of executive decision making ability. They needn't come to you every time there is an issue with a customer. Allow them to ascertain the customer's needs and act accordingly. As long as they operate within the parameters of your philosophy, this works just fine.

4. Observe the competition in your industry. While you don't want to be a blatant copycat, it is helpful to take note what does and doesn't work for your contemporaries. This is especially true if your business consistently lags behind others in customer satisfaction.

References

• Microsoft Education: Customer Focus