By Soumitra Chakraborty
Customer care involves putting systems in place to maximize your customers’ satisfaction with your business. It should be a prime consideration for every business - your sales and profitability depends on keeping your customers happy.
Customer care is more directly important, in some roles than others. For receptionists, sales staffs and other employees, in customer facing roles, customer care should be –core element of their job description and training, and a core criterion when you are recruiting.
But do not neglect the importance of customer care in other areas of your business;
For example, your warehousing and dispatch departments may have minimal contacts with your customers- but their performance when fulfilling orders has a major impact on customers’ satisfaction with your business.
A huge range of factors can contribute to customer satisfaction, but your customers-both consumers and other businesses – are likely to take into account.
a) How well you keep your customers informed.
b) The value for money you offer.
c) The professionalism, friendliness and expertise of your employees.
d) How well your product or service matches customer needs.
e) Your efficiency and relialibility in fulfilling orders.
1) Understand your customer:-
In business to business trading, providing a high level of customer care often requires you to find out what your customers want. Once you have identified your potential customers, you can target your highest levels of customer care towards them. One more thing should be kept in mind- that particularly in the consumer market, your obligation to treat all consumers to the highest standard.
2) Collect information about your customers:-
Information about customer and what they want available from many sources including:-
a) Changes in individual customers order patterns.
b) Their order history.
c) Direct feedback – if you ask them, they will usually tell you what they want.
d) Records of their contacts with your business- phone calls, meetings and so on.
e) Changes in overall success of specific product or services.
f) Feed back about your existing range-what it does and does not do.
g) Enquires about possible new product and services.
3) Manage your customer information:-
It is important that you draw up a plan about how customer information is to be gathered and uses in your business. Establish a customer care policy. Assign a senior
manager as a policy’s champion but make sure that all your staff are involved – after the lower down the scale you go, the more direct contact with customers you have.
4) Measure your customer service levels:-
Where possible, puts systems in place to assess your performance in business areas which significantly affect your customer satisfaction levels. Identify key performance Indicators (K.P.I s) which reflect how well which reflect how well you are responding to your customers’ expectations.
For instance, you might track:-
a) The no. of complaint about your products and services.
b) The no. of damages or faulty goods returned.
c) Sales renewals rates.
d) The no. of contacts with a customers’ each month.
e) The no of complaint about your employees
f) Time taken from order till delivery your customers and employees will be useful sources of information about the K. P. I. which best reflect key customer service areas in your business. Make sure the things you measure are driven not by how your business currently runs, but by how your customer would like to see them run.
In the next part there would some more important points which will help you
To take your customer care level at a peak.
This entry was posted on Sunday, September 14th, 2008 at 9:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
