Be Willing to Serve

Service is a quality that applies to more than the hospitality industry. Good service makes every customer happy. Good service makes sales and keeps you in business longer.

Train your employees how to properly take care of a customer. Here are some tips that might assist you:

• Don't have $$ in your eyes – Customers know when they are feeling used. When you treat them like they are nothing more than a sale, they will notice.
• Try to help customer with their needs – If it seems simple, that’s because it is. Customers are coming to your business with questions. Don’t throw your marketing jargon at them. Help them with their problems. Sometimes it won’t immediately end in a sale, but good word-of-mouth can lead to a sale.
• Go out of the way to assist your customer – Show that you care about them by taking time to go out of the way to find solutions for their questions. When I went to PetSmart, one of their greeters literally tracked me down to see if I needed help with anything. Although I did not need help, it stuck in my mind. I will most certainly recommend PetSmart more now because of it.

Although assisting your customer may take more of your time, it is a great benefit to you, your company, and your profits.

Brad Harmon is the President at a leading financing company, First Star Capital (www.firststarcapital.com). Brad is a frequent contributor to online publications and newsletters, and is the author of this blog on commercial financing topics.

Improve the Customer Experience on Your E-commerce Site

You can lose hundreds, if not thousands of dollars by making a poorly constructed website. Customers will become frustrated and want to take their business elsewhere. To provide the best website experience for your customer, try to implement some of these tips.

• Have contact information easy to navigate to.
• Have thought through navigation. If you have sub navigations, make it obvious and easy.
• Have a search box. This will help customers get to what they want quickly. Most website visitors want to get to what they are looking for in three click or less. Having a searching function can get the visitor to their product in two clicks.
• Having good search results. It is very disappointing to be shopping for a green phone, search, and get a list of text links. If you can, have images come up in the search results.
• Good content that is easy to find.
• Offer a breadcrumb trail. This is a trail at the top of the page that lets the visitor know exactly where they are in relation to the structure of the site. For example, the breadcrumb trail could be "Apparel > Watches > Men's > Sport."
• Have pleasing colors (please, no neon green against neon pink!)
• Strong checkout that spells out where the customer is and what they need to do. Amazon.com spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars to develop their 1-Click shopping method. You can never go too far to have a strong shopping cart system.

Brad Harmon is the President at a leading financing company, First Star Capital (www.firststarcapital.com). Brad is a frequent contributor to online publications and newsletters, and is the author of this blog on commercial financing topics.

8 Customer Service Blunders

Every customer values good customer service. Customer service can be a company's greatest asset or its greatest impairment. To keep you company image strong and your customer service top-notch, avoid some of these mistakes:

1. Having an untrained staff. No matter how many employees you have in your company, make sure that every one of them are trained. Customers will not tolerate incorrect information or lies, which can sometimes happen when the employee does not know how to help.
   
2. Trying to win the argument. Keep in mind that the "customer is always right." It is far more difficult to gain one new customer than to keep a current one.
   
3. Standing by your policy. Taking care of the customer is far more important than standing by a policy.
   
4. Not fulfilling your promises. If you make a promise to a customer, make sure that you will fulfill it. If you promise something will be there by Wednesday, you make sure it is there by Wednesday.
   
5. Being inaccessible. Be sure to always be able to be contacted by the customer. Nothing is more frustrating than not being able to reach the person, or even just a person, to talk to. Also be sure to be diligent in calling customers back. Calling a customer back quickly will always win points in their book.
   
6. Having poor record keeping. Make sure your notes on the customers are correct and that you are addressing the right person. Nothing is more frustrating for a customer than having been promised their phone bill would be canceled, then being charged fees for not paying the bill.
   
7. Not listening to the customer. Sometimes customer service representatives do not listen to the customers and answer with non-relevant responses. Make sure to pay close attention to the customer and to their problem.
   
8. Not being polite. "Please" and "thank you" will go a long way. They are so simple but always win points with the customer.

Making sure that your customers are taken care of should be your top priority. They are the reason you were, are, and will be in business.

Brad Harmon is the President at a leading financing company, First Star Capital (www.firststarcapital.com). Brad is a frequent contributor to online publications and newsletters, and is the author of this blog on commercial financing topics.