Creating a Culture of Service Excellence

The definition of customer service includes factors like location, access, speed, product quality, communication, competitive pricing, knowledgeable sales associates, store hours, return policies, and price guarantees.

In her book Ordinary Acts, Extraordinary Outcomes, Betsy Sanders defines customer service as "what the customers are willing to pay for."

Linda Hyde, with PricewaterhouseCoopers, defines customer service as "enabling the customer to have an efficient, productive, and enjoyable shopping experience," while Mark Larson of KPMG defines it as "providing customers with what they want when they need it."

All retailers pledge to give good customer service, but guerrillas understand that customer service quality is defined by the customer, and not by the store's owners, management, merchandisers, or sales team. They understand that customer service is not a department.

It takes five times as much time and effort to attract new customers as it does to keep current ones.

Sometimes it doesn't seem like it, but 96 percent of unhappy customers won't complain, but nine out of 10 won't come back. Each unhappy customer will tell nine others about their experience, and 13 percent of them will tell as many as 20 others about your poor service.

It's really not fair, because happy customers will only tell five others about your great service, and only one of those will become a customer. It's a whole lot easier to lose customers to poor service than it is to keep them.

Good service is meeting the customer's expectations; great service is exceeding it.

COMMANDMENTS OF CUSTOMER SERVICE

The cover story, "Saving Customer Service: Are Retailers up to the Challenge?" in Stores Magazine, cites the Commandments of Customer Service:

Put Your Customers First

Guerrillas understand that without customers, they'd have no business. Customer service needs to be the first priority and all other store departments revolve around it.

Make It Easy

Life is complicated. Customers want their shopping experiences to be entertaining, efficient and productive. They want to buy what they want, where they want when they want it. For guerrillas everything from access to checkout is done with the customers' best interest in mind.

Know Your Customers

Guerrillas target their merchandise, their service, their pricing, and even their business hours to their customers. In order to do that, they use surveys, focus groups and third party calling to find out what consumers in their market look for in exceptional retailers.

Keep It Simple

Simplicity is the antidote for our complex world. Don't make customers jump through hoops to get a sale price or a refund. Avoid a small print mentality and make your policies customer-friendly.

Cultivate a Service Culture

Service, service, service may even be eclipsing the old location, location, location mantra as a way to market to your customers. Today's retailing is more about customer satisfaction than about product quality, price, or convenience. What do you sell?

It's All About the Customer

Customers always go where they get good value. Value is the perceived relationship between quality, quantity, and price. Value is our customer's perception; that is, it is not what we think, but what they think.

Customers always go where they are treated well. "Whatever-it-takes customer service" will increase your customers' perception of value and improve their shopping experience at your business.

When the value isn't obvious, or when the level of service slips, the customer slips away. Your customers simply walk out the front door and take their business elsewhere. They don't tell you that they are going; they just disappear.

Successful business owners understand these laws and use them to maintain a strong customer focus.

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Reprinted by permission from Guerrilla Retailing How to Make Big Profits from Your Small Retail Business, published by The Guerrilla Group, Inc. For more information, call (800) 247-9145 or visit gmarketing.com.