Step 1 Ask

If you want to know what your customers think about your products and service ask them. If your business if a physical business, you can simply stop one or two of them and inquire about the service and the goods and services. Customers are all to happy to let you know what needs improvements. Even if your business is online, you can still request that customers fill up a complaint about service form to let you know how you are doing. Visit godaddy.com to find out how you can add a customer complaint form to your site.

Step 2 Survey

One of the best ways to gather quick information about customers or receive feedback from them is to use a survey form. You may be familiar with this method as statisticians use it all the time for market research data collection. Surveys provide a quick way to ask general and pointed questions about your business and find out how they think about your goods based on a scale of 1 to 5. Visit aplus.net to find out how to add surveys to your site to get customer responses.

Step 3 Use a feedback form

Unlike a customer complaint form, a customer feedback form is a form where customers can assign points to evaluate the usefulness of your products and your business. This form allows your clients to state specific pros and cons about the quality of service, the value of your business, what they would like to see, and how you can make such improvements. Visit networksolutions.com to have a customer feedback form attached to your checkout online. If you business is offline, you can order feedback forms from networksolutions.com and make copies for your clients.

Step 4 Get a pro

If you are serious about customer feedback, you can hire a pro at elance.com to help you customize a customer feedback mechanism that will help you understand your customers and their thoughts about your firm.

Step 5 Visit social networks

Customers may not always tell you the truth. Remember the last time you filled out a customer feedback form? If you are like many people, you rushed through it and was suspicious so you put only good remarks to avoid being asked further questions. Go to Twitter.com or Facebook.com and even LinkedIn.com and do a search on your business name. Read the comments. If none are there, inquire if anyone has heard of your business and review the feedback. The most honest feedback is the best kind.

Remember, receiving customer feedback is only half the battle. Be sure to implement their comments to improve service and product lines. Please visit stepsto.com for more great business advice.

Live telephone operators who work in call centers and answering services need the same help that any live speaker needs. It’s the job of the call center operator to communicate the client’s business image to the caller, and this begins with the first few seconds of the phone call. Many small business owners’ needs never go beyond representatives answering their lines with “XYZ Company, may I help you?” and improvising the rest of the conversation to obtain the information that the client requests. When clients upgrade their accounts to more complex services, it’s important that they create a script that works for both the company signing up for the service, the operator reading the script, and the customer. Your sales representative is more than willing to help you create the best script to fit all of your sales or information inquiries.

Creating a call center script begins with the “answer phrase” and the same principles continue through the entire process of creating a logical script. H ere are some important items to keep in mind when you are creating your script:

Step 1 • Avoid tongue twisters. Make your greeting as easy to pronounce as possible. “Doctor Perkowicz Peoria Plastic Surgery Plaza” isn’t easy to say, even for the native English speaker. Make sure that your operators know how to pronounce every part of your answer phrase, and the rest of the words in your script. Keep phrases brief and avoid repeating consonant sounds that will sound awkward over the phone or might lead the operator to stutter.

Step 2 • Go global. A “Good Morning/ Evening” greeting can work for some businesses, but not for all of them. If your company is doing business across time zones, think about using a simple “Hello, XYZ Company” for your customer on the other end of the globe.

Step 3 • Humanize your greeting. Have an impartial friend or a trusted customer listen to your greeting, especially if it’s a long introductory message of more than a sentence or two. Do you sound like a recording? If you give that impression to a caller, the person on the other end of the line might just hang up because she wants to talk with a live person, not a machine. Keep all parts of your script brief and give the operator relaying your message time to breathe and sound like a live person when you create your script.

Step 4 • Less is more. There’s a temptation to try and pack all the information about your company into your call center script, including providing an operator a copy of your frequently asked questions list (FAQ) so that he or she can quickly scan the file and answer 99.9 % of your callers’ questions. However, this skill takes practice and training on the part of the operator and patience on the part of the caller. Long pauses to look up information, add expensive minutes to the call and are frustrating experiences for the operator and the caller alike. Extensive account training is available through most call centers, if your budget permits. If this resource is not an option for you, limit the information available to the operators to a few facts about your product or service, and let them know that it’s okay to ask callers if someone from the right department can return their call and answer their questions in depth.

Step 5 • Test. Call your account weekly and test to make sure that the operators are following your instructions, are handling your scripts the way that you expect, and are able to easily access the information that they need to take your calls. After the honeymoon period with a new account, operators often grow lax and shorten your script, or improvise far beyond the call of duty. This can be detrimental to your business. Make sure that you follow up with your call center to make sure they are serving your needs.

Step 6 • Tweak, and tweak again. Review your script from time to time, and see if it’s still leading to action. Ultimately, your script should lead to a sale, an appointment a request for more information or further contact from your office. Check your call logs and any statistics your sales representative provides you with on a monthly basis. If you notice a downward trend in your results, work with your sales rep to change your script.

These suggestions are only the beginning of creating a successful call center script for your organization. Work with your sales representative and listen to their suggestions, add your own, do your market research and your script will be a success. Clear communication starts with clear instructions from you, and clear voices on the answering end of your phone lines. Your call center will work with you to make sure that all of your needs are filled over and above your expectations.

Improve Customer Service

You know how important customer service excellence is to the success of your business. It will help attract more customers and keep them coming back. It will generate more word-of-mouth referrals and positive impressions. Indeed, exceptional service is such a rarity these days, that achieving it—or even aiming for it—is almost certain to establish a significant competitive advantage. Nevertheless, this is one area where “good enough” isn’t. You need to aim high—and keep trying.

WHAT IT MEANS: Organizations exceed customer expectations by focusing their improvement efforts in three areas: customer-friendly processes, employee commitment to customer service, and customer dialog. You must be excellent in all three areas to achieve excellent customer service. This is one area that needs to be micromanaged or extensively scrutinized and evaluated. A customer service seminar or retreat session for your workers or managers is a good start; a customer service suggestion or rewards program is a good idea—but it takes more than this to create a corporate culture that’s truly committed to service excellence. Everyone, from the top down, has to walk the talk. Processes have to be made more customer-friendly. Continual customer service improvement is possible, but it must be continually pursued.

ACTION PLAN: There are five pillars that can help you get from good to great: find and retain quality people, make service a core value (so employees can think beyond the policy manual), empower frontline employees with the discretion to make customers more satisfied, solicit and use customer feedback, and pick the right customers (decide who your core customers are, and do what you can to woo and wow them).

EVEN BETTER: Try doing business with your company. Place an order, call tech support, request some sales literature, or try to get a return authorization—or have some “service-quality scouts” do this for you and report back to you. The results could be very enlightening. The more you can view every facet of your company from your customers’ perspective, the more clues you’ll gain regarding potential areas of improvement.

(Excerpted from: 10 Clowns Don’t Make a Circus. . . and 249 Other Critical Management Success Strategies by Steven Schragis and Rick Frishman)

You Can’t Put “Thank You” in the Bank

This rule is tricky because it’s a bit of a balancing act and a judgment call. To woo a client, you naturally want to put your best foot forward. You want to be as helpful as possible so as to demonstrate your expertise or the quality of your product or service. And that’s OK—but that said, don’t let visions of monster orders seduce you into giving away the store.

WHAT IT MEANS: At some point—and the sooner, the better—you have to start getting paid. After all, you are trying to stay in business. There are some customers who will think nothing of stringing you along with promises, buck-passing, delays, et cetera, and sometimes that’s a legitimate part of the sales cycle. It’s a little bit like fishing—you have to know when to give a little more line and when to cut bait.

ACTION PLAN: Review all the times you’ve been strung along by a customer. Did you have a sense at any time that you were being taken advantage of? In retrospect, what could you have done to avoid or curtail that scenario? Also realize that many people (and yes, customers are people) will take whatever they think they can get away with, so it’s up to you to set limits and to say no.

EVEN BETTER: Discuss this issue with your sales manager or more experienced sales reps. Different companies will take different positions on this issue—and a certain amount of discretion is well advised. For example, a potentially HUGE customer might be worth a little more leeway. Nevertheless, it is generally a good idea to make it clear to your prospects that they can get a sample or an initial consultation or a detailed proposal but that the meter will start running at Point A. Ask for the sale!

(Excerpted from: 10 Clowns Don’t Make a Circus. . . and 249 Other Critical Management Success Strategies by Steven Schragis and Rick Frishman)

Keep Your Integrity

In an ideal world, making compromises or unclear moral choices would not be an issue. People would always do the right thing—and so would you. The world we live in is obviously quite different. There is more than a touch of gray, morally, to many business dealings, and there are more than a few people who fit the term ethically challenged. You may not be able to change them or the world, but you might have to work with them.

WHAT IT MEANS: Espousing perfect behavior 24/7 is not realistic, and it’s not what this rule is about. It’s more about keeping your actions aligned with your values, about bending here and there without breaking, and about having a clear and conscious sense of where to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Integrity is the foundation of character and the cornerstone of your reputation in business. Once it’s broken, it may be exceedingly difficult to fix. Most of all, it’s about honesty—being honest with yourself, honest enough to admit when something just doesn’t feel right, and honest enough to realize that cutting corners morally can rapidly become a very slippery slope.

ACTION PLAN: Ask yourself this question: what are your most important values in life? Your answer will reveal an enormous amount about you. What would you pay for, sacrifice for, suffer for, and fight for? What would you stand up for, or refuse to lie down for? What are the values that you hold most dear? Think these questions through carefully, and when you get a chance, write down your answers.

EVEN BETTER: If you have some reservations about doing something, sleep on it. Whatever qualms you might have about a certain morally dubious business activity could be your conscience sending you a red alert. In study after study, the quality of integrity, or a person’s adherence to values, ranks as the number one quality sought in every field. When it comes to determining whom they will do business with, customers rank the honesty of a salesperson as the most important single quality. And even if that weren’t true, maintaining your integrity will help you sleep better at night and be more comfortable with who you are during the day.

(Excerpted from: 10 Clowns Don’t Make a Circus. . . and 249 Other Critical Management Success Strategies by Steven Schragis and Rick Frishman)

Pamper Your Customers

Why do you suppose all evidence proves that it costs at least five times as much to sell to a new customer as to an existing customer? That’s easy. Because the price is high to find a new customer, while finding an existing customer is free. It’s far less expensive to retain customers—by delighting and pampering them—than it is to acquire new ones, yet most companies blatantly continue to ignore this clear and compelling rule.

WHAT IT MEANS: Pamper your existing customers. It will set you apart from 95 percent of your competition. It will help you compete on a basis other than price. It will generate repeat business. And, as word of mouth is well known to be the most effective form of advertising, it will generate a steady stream of new customers through glowing referrals. In his book Guerilla Marketing Weapons: 100 Affordable Marketing Methods for Maximizing Profits from Your Small Business, marketing guru Jay Conrad Levinson says, “There are few if any other marketing weapons with the power, cost-effectiveness, and economy of satisfied customers.”

ACTION PLAN: Customer pampering is anything you can do that can make your customers feel recognized, appreciated, and special. It’s going the extra mile. It’s adding a little bit (or even more than a little bit) of “Wow” to the way you do business—coffee service in the reception area . . . dropping off papers or delivering an order in person so the customer doesn’t have to pick it up . . . or writing a note or e-mail just to say “thanks for being our customer.”

EVEN BETTER: Develop loyalty programs designed to increase overall satisfaction, encourage repeat business, and delight your best customers. You can focus on rewarding customers who have repeat purchases, such as discounts for frequent purchases, special “loyal customer only” sales, or gifts to frequent buyers. However, it is important to realize that not all freebies will work with all customers—a free T-shirt may work for one business but be perceived as “too tacky” by customers of another business—so consider this matter carefully. Surveys, focus groups, and direct discussions with customers can be helpful in this area.

(Excerpted from: 10 Clowns Don’t Make a Circus. . . and 249 Other Critical Management Success Strategies by Steven Schragis and Rick Frishman)

Companies Don’t Have Personalities—They Have Images

Any particular corporate image or perceptions we might have is inextricably linked to a company’s people—how they act, how they present themselves, and, above all, how they interact with you. As the old customer service axiom says, “Customers don’t care how much you know; they care how much you care.”

WHAT IT MEANS: We often think of certain companies as being friendly or being rude. Jet Blue, for example, has a reputation for being friendly and helpful, while other airlines are perceived as giving you the runaround—and not necessarily to where you want to go. Some companies micromanage the customer experience to the nth degree, leaving no contingency unscripted. Others seem to derive a strange glee from casting you into the depths of voice-mail hell, all the while intermittently reassuring you that “Your call is very important to us”—but apparently not important enough to hire a sufficient number of living, breathing customer service representatives.

ACTION PLAN: When you’re on the phone or dealing with a customer in person, recognize that your entire company’s reputation is on the line. The more you treat your customers with respect, empathy, and a caring, can-do attitude, the more new business you’ll attract. It’s as simple—and challenging—as that.

EVEN BETTER: There’s a tendency in many companies to take a dim and dismissive view of customers—after all, customers can be so demanding and intrusive! They are, however, the only reason your business is still in business. Everyone in your company would do well to appreciate that and react accordingly—but you need to lead by example. Make customer service excellence an ongoing priority for your company. Hire for it. Train for it. Monitor it. Reward for it. Believe it!

(Excerpted from: 10 Clowns Don’t Make a Circus. . . and 249 Other Critical Management Success Strategies by Steven Schragis and Rick Frishman)

Step 1 Determine the real problem

When a customer is angry, and moreover, wrong, it makes it hard to treat them with the attitude and respect they deserve. Angry and difficult customers are a major cause of workplace stress, and they can cause disarray amongst your employees. You and your team probably assume that the angry customer wants his or her “issue” fixed. In part that is true – they are contacting or approaching your for a solution. However, there is probably something deeper. Other than just wanting the problem fixed they want to feel like you are really hearing them and really listening to them. It’s more of an emotional response than anything else.

Step 2 Listen to your customers

Your employees need to acknowledge the problem and the angry customer in addition to actually fixing the problem. It is important for your employee to stay calm and tell the customer first that they recognize there is a problem and that they intend to fix it. Then the customer can be calm.

Step 3 Make concessions with your customers

Sometimes overwhelmed or overly emotional customers will not hear the questions you are asking and then you have to repeat yourself and that just makes everyone upset. So acknowledge the customer, calm him or her down, and work right away to solving the problem.

It’s that simple. Remember, your customers are your business. Treat them well and they will do wonders for you in return for good service. Please visit for more great business advice.