Every once in awhile I chat with a client, an associate, or a friend who has a story about bad customer service. But not of the normal variety. The situations that stand out to me are when a customer is trying to do business with a company that seemingly doesn’t want the business. It’s happened to me on several occasions as well. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why a business wouldn’t want a new customer. If their workload is too heavy and they don’t need me as a customer, the least they could do is tell me, right? It comes across like they hate money. But what I really mean is, it comes across like they hate their customers.
On that note, I’ve put together a quick list of things to do if you never want to make a sale:
1. Don’t return phone calls or emails from people who WANT to buy your product/service right now.
2. In fact, don’t ever respond to any email or answer any phone call.
3. Say you’ll do something and then don’t do it.
Now that I’ve got that off my chest. Let’s talk about the positive.
Things you should do NO MATTER WHAT to sell your product/service:
1. Sometimes it’s improbable to answer every single email and respond to every single phone call in a day, and I get that. So, layout a plan for responding. It could be phone calls are responded to same day, and emails are responded to in 12 hours.
2. This next one is so simple it’s scary. If you say you’re going to do something, do it. If you aren’t going to be able to do what you said you were going to do when you said you were going to do it, then say so. Honesty is awesome.
3. Which brings me to this. Be honest with your customers. It won’t hurt you, and it certainly won’t hurt them.
As you’ve probably noticed, these things have less to do with actually making money, and more to do with taking care of your customers. If you take care of your customers, I promise they’ll take care of you.