12 easy ways to improve your customer service

Here are 12 easy and very simple ways to improve your customer service.

1. Find out your customer’s birthday and incorporate a way to surprise them that also benefits your business.
2. Have a trusted friend or advisor walk through your business and comment on anything they don’t love.
3. Have a friend call your business with an enquiry while you listen on speakerphone.
4. Learn to love complaints. Keep a log of any complaints and actually do something to ensure they don’t happen again.
5. Systematically ask your customers what they like and don’t like about your business.
6. Work out a way to give your clients a gift that costs you nothing, but gives them value. The easiest way is through a strategic alliance with another business that wants access to your clients, ie. a photographer, coffee shop, restaurant, video rental store, homewares store, etc.
7. Acknowledge every customer as soon as they walk in your door (even if you can’t see to them immediately – a smile costs nothing).
8. And on that note… Smile. When you see customers. When you’re on the phone. When you’re in the street.
9. Make sure customers can identify who your staff are (uniform, name tag, groovy apron, funny hat).
10. Clearly display your opening hours on your front window and website. There’s nothing more frustrating than standing outside a place of business clueless as to when it opens.
11. Get back to emails promptly (set a minimum standard in your workplace and make sure everyone knows it).
12. Send awesome Christmas cards that are personalised and let people know you actually took the time to think about THEM, not just about getting the cards done.

Kirsty Dunphey is the youngest ever Australian Telstra Young Business Woman of the Year, author of two books (her latest release is ‘Retired at 27, If I Can do it Anyone Can’) and a passionate entrepreneur who started at age 15 and opened her own real estate agency at 21. Currently Kirsty heads up www.reallysold.com the premium online copywriting site for real estate agents and is a co-director of Elephant Propertywww.elephantproperty.com.au Launceston, Tasmania’s only boutique real estate agency purely for investment property owners. Kirsty’s other ventures are outlined at her website www.kirstydunphey.com where you can also sign up for her newsletter.