Customer, Customer, Customer!!!!

Without customers, no business can really succeed. So to take care of those customers, no matter their needs, their wants, concerns, or whatever, should be at the core of every business. That includes webhosting and the like.

NO matter if you are the worlds worst salesman, if you can learn to take care of your customers and give them a positive experience, you will earn back more than what you lack.

Here's some tips:
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**The customer is always right

-why not? If you have them around, not matter what you have to do for them, you will win in the end. Do not argue, make it happen for them.........there are always options to any situation.

**Do whatever you can to keep a customer

-If a customer is not happy, make them happy. YOu will always have customers that never complain to make up for the ones who are demanding. Go the extra mile............all customers have the potential to bring more customers and thus more business.

**Give incentives to stay

-If a customer wants to leave, give them an incentive to stay. If they still want to leave, give them an incentive to come back. Say "If you decide to return within the next 6 months, we'll give you X and Y for Z."

**Communication is the key

-Putting more into communication with your customers will make them feel at home. If a customer has to wait days for a repsonse to their issues, they will not feel their business is important to you. Respond quickly.

**Find out what others are doing

-See what your competitors are doing that is standard for their customers. Learn to adapt and change to meeting those new expectations. Staying competitive or at least at a minimum of expectations is a must for success.

**Don't be afraid to innovate

-Go beyond the norm. Set new standards. Give more than the others. Set yourself apart.

**A customer's time is valuable

-Customers do not take away from your work. THEY ARE YOUR WORK. Without them you are without business. Respect the time they give to do business with you.

**Listen to your customers

-Yes, it may get old, especially if you've got alot of customers. However, you never know what you can pick up or learn to make your business just that much better.

**Earn trust from your customers

-Do what you say, and say what you do. Don't skimp on service. If a customer needs something done, think ahead of them and do it right the first time. Do something extra also. Setup protocols for support to cover all bases no matter the request.

**Think of yourself as fragile

-To constantly evaluate what your business needs to do to improve itself is better than the "holier than thou" business attitude. To think of your business as the best is a comfortable state. Strive to MAKE it the best instead. To exemplify an attitude of wanting to be the best instead of "we are the best" is read much more positively by a customer. It shows you care about outcomes and the image of your business. "We want to be our best at what we do". Express this through action rather than words. If you do this, the customers will hear your attitude without it being spoken.

These are just a few tips that many here can probably add to. Everyday we all probably run into businesses that can apply a few of these ideas. It's not something that can be learned from a book, but something that has to be practiced to benefit from. Customers definately appreciate it and enjoy it. Businesses definately succeed with it.

:)

That is somewhat good advice. However, you can't give the customer more than what you can afford. If the customer is asking you to do things above and beyond your pricing structure (such as debug 3rd party installed scripts, website design issues, etc.)...then you must say "no" or the rest of your customers will eventually suffer.

--Tina

HouseG,

Well, Customers themselves have their ever changing needs, wants and expectations, you should be prepared to implement and bring improvement as per their need and you should benchmark it. I think it is also important to implement the strategies to deal with specific customer behaviors and personalities.

Sorry, but I couldn't hold my tongue! The customer is not always right! Sometimes they're 100% wrong - and in this case, the best thing to do is tell them! If you give in to their every demand, they become a draining customer and you end up losing more money on them than you ever would have made in the first place - believe me, I know!

I think particular for those specific customers you should implement strategies depending on their merit to deal with them, it may possible that you've to take some time drastic decision to keep out them or you can find a solution on mutual interest reaching on a comfort zone.

All buzz-wordiness aside...some customers are just plain not nice people.

You need to set fairly firm guidelines of what services you will and will not offer...and if a customer isn't willing to respect those guidelines, you have to cut them loose before it affects everyone else.

--Tina

Ok, you two put it in much nicer words than I could! :P

Overall, HouseG, a good article! The first three points kind of got to me though!

Originally posted by globalwebbrands
Sorry, but I couldn't hold my tongue! The customer is not always right! Sometimes they're 100% wrong - and in this case, the best thing to do is tell them! If you give in to their every demand, they become a draining customer and you end up losing more money on them than you ever would have made in the first place - believe me, I know!

The customers is always right. We may not have the right solution for each customer. But that surely does not mean that the customer is wrong.

As Tina said "you can't give the customer more than what you can afford. ".... It is true that Mercedes cannot compete with a Hyundai... But, that does not mean the Hyundai customers are wrong.... i.e. we all cater to just some segments of the market.. We cannot cater to every market and customer.

I think HouseG has given some excellent points here...

I quote below Gandhi...


A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption of our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider to our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to do so.



Have a nice day :)

Regards
Amar

Amar,

I'm afraid that your automobile comparison is quite pointless in this particular discussion. That's like saying the customer would get mad because they ordered a Cessna Citation thinking they could fit 250 in it and get mad when it is delivered. Obviously, no one would do this - in the same way, no one would buy a Hyundai and expeect it to be on par with a Mercedes. As you say, this has to do with targeting different markets - something far different than customers being wrong.

To try to illustrate what i'm saying, let me give you a real-life situation that we experienced earlier this year (I'll go into as little detail as possible, but follow along):

Earlier this year, I had a very big website design client that I had signed my biggest contract yet for. This was going to be an ongoing job, and we were going to build a long-term relationship with this client. However, we ran into a few problems. Not only was the client's business name infringing on a competing company catering to the same market, they wanted us to copy that competitor's site almost exactly. They even insisted that we use copyrighted images that they found on the Internet on their website.

Tell me, was this customer right and we were wrong? (And before answering, keep in mind that this is a market we cater to, so don't answer back about it being a different segment of the market.)

I hope this illustrates to you why the customer is not always right. This isn't utopia, or fairyland, or some other place like that - this is real life, and nobody is always right, no matter who they are.

(Just for the record, we quickly dropped the client I mentioned above because of the continuous problems we were having. Yes, we lost a lot of money - but it was worth it to avoid the kind of problems we would have had, and the even bigger amount of money we would have lost.)

“The customer is always right”

I’ve always had a little problem with this business “truism”

A better saying would be “the customer is always the customer”. They can be a delight to deal with and they can be unreasonable, but they are always the customers.

As businesses, our entire existence depends on gaining and retaining customers. I truly enjoy making customers as happy with our products and services as is humanly possible.

However, there are some customers that you are better off parting ways with. In twenty years of doing business I’ve been forced to “fire” a small number of customers. Thankfully, they were the exceptions. I’ve found that most customers are more than reasonable in their expectations and requests.

Sometimes it is better to say goodbye, than continually reach for the bottle of antacids.

Originally posted by bobcares
The customers is always right.

Maybe in a perfect world.

Example:

Customer calls up and insists the server her website is on is down. We explain that she's using nameservers for her old host and she needs to update them. She swears at our tech over the phone (btw- we do not provide support via phone. she called a number listed for server outages.) and insists our server is down. Tech offers to update DNS for her, but needs her domain login information. Customer accuses tech of trying to steal her domain and threatens to sue us for fraud.

After she came into our chatroom and started "screaming" about how awful we were, how she's been with us for 3 days and the server has been down the entire time AND a potential dedicated server client left scared...we decided to terminate her account and refund her money.

Is the customer right? Not only is she WRONG, but no matter how much we offered to help her and explain the situation...she refused to believe.

--Tina

--Tina

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Prophet6

“the customer is always the customer”

True, agreed, I know most of the customers are professional and honest, but what definition you'll give to those customers who has not paid you or ask for chargeback with false reason after availing your true service and support? I came across with a thread in WHT itself that a customer even declared himself "dead” to avoid payment. Many companies are approaching collection agencies for recovery and I wonder few of them threatened the business owner to sue him framing false charge even.

Originally posted by etechsupport2

but what definition you'll give to those customers who has not paid you or ask for chargeback with false reason after availing your true service and support?

Deadbeats. Plain and simple. And I wouldn't hesitate to use a collections agency, when appropriate, to cause them as much trouble as possible.

Most of the time it is best to chalk it up as a lesson learned and move on.


Bill

People are taking this "the customer is always right" way to seriously and way to literally.

It's just an internal philosophy of trying your best to cater to the client, not some universal law that needs to be applied everywhere. People who truly think the customer is always right no matter what they do are missing the point.

Originally posted by AH-Tina
Maybe in a perfect world.

Example:

Customer calls up and insists the server her website is on is down. We explain that she's using nameservers for her old host and she needs to update them. She swears at our tech over the phone (btw- we do not provide support via phone. she called a number listed for server outages.) and insists our server is down. Tech offers to update DNS for her, but needs her domain login information. Customer accuses tech of trying to steal her domain and threatens to sue us for fraud.

After she came into our chatroom and started "screaming" about how awful we were, how she's been with us for 3 days and the server has been down the entire time AND a potential dedicated server client left scared...we decided to terminate her account and refund her money.

Is the customer right? Not only is she WRONG, but no matter how much we offered to help her and explain the situation...she refused to believe.

--Tina

--Tina

That happens too often.

Sometimes the customer is always right phrase gets to the customers head, and they do not want to believe anything.

The customer is only right to a degree. What a customer becomes a headache, and costing money, it's time to let them go. In Tina's example, that lady cost Tina a potential dedicated sale.
I too, have experienced this. No doubt he was a kid, and was with me from the start of my business. He had my IM, and contacted me regarding every single thing, even trival matters like which forum board is best. My business grew and I was no longer able to be there for his every little cry for help. I was busy running other aspects of the business. I requested that he use the same means of support that everyone else did, that being the helpdesk. And when he repeatly refused, I finally blocked him on IM. Then he accused me of failing to provide support, though he never used the proper channels. He ended up costing me, with the time he consumed. I let him go.

So no... customers aren't always right. I would agree that a customer is always a customer. Yes, they are important to the growth an success of any business, but to extent will you go?