How to provide best service to your clients
Editor's note: In today's highly competitive marketplace, customers are spoiled for choice and may demand more than just better product features, lower prices and ease of accessing the product or service. After all, these benefits could be easily replicated by any other company or improved upon by competitors with deeper pockets and more resources.
What you should provide is not only a customer service but a remarkable one.
In this issue and the next, we invited Nick Zhang, manager of the IT & Industrial Sales division at Robert Walters' Shanghai office, to talk about "a remarkable service" to customers. Below is the first part.
Good customer service is almost expected these days. The concept of providing the best customer service should rightfully be the bread and butter of your business. It is a way to truly differentiate yourself or your company and has to go beyond providing good customer service and offer remarkable service, which is focused on securing customers' loyalty and trust.
Remarkable service is simply about forging a long term, personal relationship with your customers, making them happy enough to refer their friends to you - who may in turn become repeat customers themselves.
For a professional services consultancy, good customer service forms the lifeblood of the business. Here are some tips on what we have learned in our relentless pursuit of delivering remarkable customer service to stay ahead of the competition:
1) The fastest way to lose a customer's trust is failing to live up to your promises. Building false expectations to close a deal and not delivering only goes to show how little you value them or their business.
Your reliability and credibility are likely to come into question, and you will soon find that your customers will choose not to do business with you and will turn to your competitors. The equation is simple - you break your promise to the customers, you break their trust at the same time.
2) Tough competition in the market puts tremendous pressure on sales and service professionals to give their best - or rather the organization's best efforts - to service customers and clients.
The most outstanding sales and service people usually rise above that and are capable of providing a remarkable service out of genuine passion for their work and their commitment to satisfying and delighting their clients.
3) It sounds like a simple thing to do, but you will be surprised about how often a call goes unanswered, and as a result, your customers and clients are forced to seek an alternative. The opportunity cost can be as trivial as being less inefficient in providing timely services to your customers to as significant as losing a potentially high-value client. On top of that, the difficulty of actually getting someone on the phone when you need them could be perceived as having poor service levels.
(Second part of this article will be published next Tuesday. Contact gaoyuan@chinadaily.com.cn for questions and career advice.)
Advice given by Nick Zhang, manager of the IT & Industrial Sales division at Robert Walters China.