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Growing your Customer Service Strategy By Ed Romson, CEO, Rocair Corporation You can plan and grow the services you offer to your customers just like an onion grows. Start small and add layers of services as you can afford them and as your customers will accept them. By doing this, you will be able to address your customer's needs, sell more products and you can even be able to add revenue for your company from those services. As you design a customer service strategy, the first items you should conquer are those basic issues that prevent your customers from buying and using your products. For example, if someone cannot discover where to buy your product, or understand what features the product has, it will be difficult to make sales. Pre-sale information, including how to buy, is an important feature of your customer service plan. If your customers have purchased the product directly from you, they need to have a way to check on the order and to contact you if there are any problems with the order or the product. If they bought the product from a retail store, they will still want to contact you if something goes wrong. Companies cannot depend on the distribution system to handle all of these customer service issues. I have seen this tried many times. The Company management says. "We will let our stores handle all of the complaints, that is the reason they get a commission." Depending on the quality of your distribution system, this may work, but time and again, I have found that if your name is on the product, the customer will want to talk directly with your company if something does not meet their expectations. There are real reasons for wanting to talk to those customers and for handling their problems. Customer Relationship Management studies have shown that a dissatisfied customer who does not make contact with the company will inform nine people of their bad experience. A customer that has a problem and can talk with the company is likely to tell five people about that good experience. Simply by allowing that customer to talk to you, you generate a large amount of good will for your products and avoid bad word of mouth publicity. These basic services are what I call "core services". They are at the center of your customer service onion. If you are just starting to develop a customer care strategy, this is the place to begin. If you have these offerings, make sure they are solid and functioning well before you decide to add new features to your plan.  The next set of customer care initiatives that can be added are those services that are specific to certain products or services that make it easier for you to sell new products. An example would be helpful, I think. Let us say that your company sells stereo equipment. Once the customers can locate your products, decide what equipment they want to buy and get help if something goes wrong, you may offer to help them by providing information on how to upgrade to a new set of equipment or how to add additional components.
Another example is that of adding a marketing effort to your customer care plan. I have mentioned in past articles that you should be keeping records of your customers. You can use those records, and other customer records like shipping data, to start a campaign to inform customers of a new product, or to tell them about enhancements to your current products. Working together, the customer service and marketing departments of your business can generate more revenue.
Once you have established your core services and the services that will help you sell specific products, you may consider offering services that will make you more money. These could be consulting services, or extended warranty contracts that you offer to your customers and which go beyond the normal warranty you offer. Some companies may not have the resources to do this. However, think about this; your company has the experts for the products you sell. They have to be experts, they designed and build the product, or at least they know enough about it and all the components that go to make the product to be able to put it all together and sell it. Make use of this expert knowledge.
If your products are highly complex, perhaps you can offer training to customers on how to utilize the product. Basic product training is one of those core services, but advance training can generate revenue. You might also use the experts in your company to act as consultants to your customers, advising them on how to use the products to the best advantage. Again, you can put a price tag on these consulting services, and your consultants can look for ways to sell more products to those customers they are working with. I am not saying that the consultant should try to sell something that the customer does not need, but some customers do not know what they need and can benefit from your advice. The end goal is a happy customer who will buy more from you and refer you to their associates.
As you start your work with customers, or work on growing a new and better crop of customer relationships, think about planting that onion of customer service. Start with the core services and let the plan grow to include new product services and finally revenue generating services. In the end you will harvest satisfied customers and greater profit.
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