Everyone is talking about the rising cost of health care. Not me. I’m talking about the health and well being of your customers.
How healthy is their relationship with you?
What’s your cost of keeping them healthy?
Is it on the rise?
Let me give you a clue about the cost of customer health. It pales in comparison to the cost of losing them.
Have any customers that are in poor health?
Have any customers who are sick (of you)?
Sick of dealing with you? Dying to replace you?
What’s the cost of that?
If your customer is angry – think of them as having business illness. They’re deathly sick of you! Like human illness, it has various stages of debility. Once discovered, you will go to all lengths, and spend thousands of fruitless dollars to try to save the patient. But if the illness is discovered too late, the patient is likely to die.
You could have spent far less dollars and prevented this illness from occurring. Instead of waiting until your customer is terminally ill, why not institute a customer wellness program to prevent illness from occurring in the first place?
Hey, wait a minute. That sounds too easy!
HERE’S A WAKE UP CALL: Prevention is the best way, the easiest way, and the least expensive way. It’s also the competition-prevention way.
Here is Jeffrey Gitomer’s Customer Wellness Program – a success formula for serving memorably and keeping customers loyal. (NOTE: It will require that EVERYONE on your team buy it, buy in, get in the groove [the customer-awareness groove], and get service healthy.)
1. Establish benchmarks. Minimum acceptable standards, methods of response, decision parameters, a list of every reason a customer calls, a list of every customer complaint, a list of every customer expectation, and a documented “best response” to each of those situations.
2. Empower employees with specific actions to decide based on your benchmarks. Empower everyone to say yes. Only empower senior management to say no.
3. Start with “YES!” Everyone needs to start with attitude training FIRST. Get there by whatever positive means it takes.
4. Train everyone in your business. Starting with YES! Attitude and developing fundamental skills in achieving goals, understanding yourself and your co-workers, developing pride, accepting responsibility, listening to understand, effective communicating, embracing change, making decisions, memorable service, and working as a team.
5. Develop a standardized “gripe response” formula. Train everyone in your organization to execute it perfectly.
6. Ask your customer to help you serve them better by asking, “What’s up doc?” or “Where does it hurt?” Listen to discover your customer’s most important characteristics in a relationship with you. Ask them where you can improve. Ask them to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses in those areas of prime importance to them. Find out their perceptions, and match them to yours. Modify or change your characteristics and perceptions to meet theirs.
7. Evaluate your own strengths and weaknesses. Make a plan for weakness improvement that has a deadline and measurable results.
8. Identify your competitive advantages (your super strengths). Play to those as often as possible. To identify them, ask customers.
9. Stay in front of your customer, more than your competition. Develop tools that aid that process (newsletters, faxes, articles, gifts, tickets).
10. Train everyone to serve exceptionally and memorably every time a customer is encountered. Treat every customer as though they were a celebrity.
11. Surprise your customers as often as you can. Exceed their expectations in a memorable way. You know what it feels like when you are surprised – do it to someone else. Get people talking about you.
12. Decide you are willing to go the extra mile. Sometimes extra effort is required to make service happen. You have to have a willingness to go the extra mile to achieve it.
12.5 Your report card is unsolicited referrals. Unsolicited referrals are the measure of your success, the testament of your quality and your ability to serve.
Think you can do it? Think you and every co-worker in your company can make customer wellness happen?
Want my opinion? You have no choice. Wellness and health care are two of the biggest issues in America. Make the wellness of your customers your biggest issue.
If you want the formula to customer loyalty, go to www.gitomer.com, register if you’re a first-time visitor, and enter the word LOYALTY in the GitBit box. •
Jeffrey Gitomer is the author of The Little Red Book of Selling. President of Charlotte-based Buy Gitomer, he gives seminars, runs annual sales meetings, and conducts Internet training programs on selling and customer service at www.trainone.com. He can be reached at (704) 333-1112 or e-mail at salesman@gitomer.com
