Friday Treat - Great Thoughts about Customer Service

Earlier this week, I shared a great insight on customer service from Jeff Bezos.  As this week’s Friday treat, I have more great thoughts about customer service to inspire you and continue thinking about ways you and I can better serve our customers and partners.

Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends. ~Walt Disney 

You are serving a customer, not a life sentence. Learn how to enjoy your work. ~Laurie McIntosh 

It starts with respect. If you respect the customer as a human being, and truly honor their right to be treated fairly and honestly, everything else is much easier.  ~Doug Smith

Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.  ~ Damon Richards 

Every client you keep, is one less that you need to find.  ~Nigel Sanders 

Customers today want the very most and the very best for the very least amount of money, and on the best terms. Only the individuals and companies that provide absolutely excellent products and services at absolutely excellent prices will survive.  ~Brian Tracy 

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.  ~Mahatma Gandhi

Remember to dwell in possibilities but have fun doing so.

Cindy

Six Thousand Friends

I just saw this quote from Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, and it got me thinking.  And I share it with you to get you thinking too.  

If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends. ~Jeff Bezos

This quote is even more pertinent now that I understand the value and power of social media and blogging.  It is amazing to me how easily we can touch, meet and serve customers and Realtor partners.  Thanks to the power of blogging, I meet new Realtors on a very regular basis and we explore ways of working together to serve their clients. 

In addition, I use social media (blogs, websites and chats) for ideas, inspirations and development.  I try to start each day checking out what is happening on my favorite blogs like Habitually Chic and Cote de Texas, to name a few.  I hunt websites constantly to make sure that I am staging my clients’ houses in ways that appeal to the current tastes of potential buyers.  And chats with other home stagers and Realtors are fun because we find out how things are being done in other parts of the country and that our challenges are not so unique.  So in a way, I have the opportunity to learn from 6,000 friends every day.

Building on Jeff Bezos insight, I believe that with the power of social media, an unhappy customer can expand their audience from the 6 in the physical world to the hundreds and possibly thousands of “friends” on Facebook, Twitter or their personal blog.  It is challenging to realize how easy it is for our clients and partners to share thoughts about how they were served with lots and lots of friends and acquaintances.

Of course, there is a simple and usually effective way to deal with the power of social media – do exceptional work and deliver exceptional results.  You need to go the “extra mile” and as Roger Staubach said so well “there are no traffic jams along the extra mile. 

My hope is that my clients and partners will be singing my praises to their hundreds of friends as I try to be a regular traveler on the “extra mile”. 

Remember to dwell in possibilities

Cindy