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Customer Service

The Importance of Customer Service During a Recession

Have you noticed the customer service in small businesses in your area has improved? During a recession small business sales slump, and every company is fighting for customers. This is when excellent customer service becomes important.

Many small business owners are realizing the important role that customer service plays in their businesses during a recession. Strategy is key, however, and many small businesses are failing to think strategically in analyzing their customer service needs. A recent article in Forbes.com found that 55% of the women-owned small businesses surveyed address customer service on a case-by-case basis and 27% don’t have any strategy at all. Only 18% have a comprehensive plan for addressing the issue.”

During the tough times it is important for a company to focus on building long-lasting relationships with its current customers while also prioritizing the existing customers. Building relationships is also cost effective because the only thing needed is your time.

Here are a few customer service techniques to help establish these relationships:

1. Touch base often – Show you care about their satisfaction through feedback and regular contact. Businesses are also keeping in contact with customers by looking to telephone answering services so that they can focus on their business and take customer calls when they are free.

2. Be proactive – Adopting a proactive strategy to customer service can help an organization reach out to customers and increase sales. Using appointment setting as well as other call center techniques can help achieve this.

3. Always listen – Listen to what your customer is saying. If they talk about an upcoming birthday or something of importance to them jot it down and remember them later. This is a great personal touch for building lasting relationships.

4. Have a communication plan – Once you establish a customer relationship keep in touch by getting their e-mail address and sending them periodic updates, resources and tips.

Customer service is an essential part of your business. But during tough times it is even more important. During a recession it does not matter who your customers are, if you do not service them with excellent customer service your competition will. Building these long-lasting relationships with customers takes time, but in the long run it becomes very invaluable. Take note of these and other customer service techniques so that during down times your customers will keep you in mind.

About the Author
Jessica Gombes is an expert writer on appointment setting and is based in San Diego, California. She writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs such as telephone answering services at Resource Nation.

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How to Thrive in a Recession

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Every time I turn on the news I feel like screaming. I am sick and tired of hearing about how bad the economy is. Unemployment is up and is only going to get worse. Banks are in trouble and going under. Real estate is a mess and there is no end in sight. Major corporations are going bankrupt – heck, even the big three automakers may go under.
I hear about how this is the next great depression. I hear about the collapse of the dollar, the collapse of the western world, and the end of society as we know it.
It Isn’t As Bad As It Sounds
The sad part is that it isn’t all that bad. Yes the economy stinks, but this is only when compared to the amazing boom we experienced in the last decade. Companies have been able to go after the low hanging fruit-heck, there was more lying on the ground than you could pick up!
Just because the ground isn’t littered with business anymore doesn’t mean that there isn’t business out there. You just have to work for it. And the past decade of easy business means that most companies have not made the connections and built relationships. Now they pay the price.
And at the end of the day, now is the time where entrepreneurs can really shine.
No, I’m not crazy. Think about what a true entrepreneur does.

  • He connects with his customer
  • identifies his needs and problems
  • then creates products and services to fill those needs or problems

In other words, he gets paid to solve problems
Now more than ever companies are in trouble. Your customer desperately needs you. No, he isn’t spending indiscriminately. But if you solve his problem and help him survive (or thrive) in this downturn he will be your customer for life. And you solve your “slow business” problem at the same time. Only an entrepreneur can do this, and you finally have an advantage over larger companies.
Simple, but Hard to Do
This is a simple concept that is hard to do. I’ve written several articles that are aimed at this:

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Sales & Marketing

The Ultimate Guide To Discovering What Your Target Market Wants

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As a solo service professional you are probably already clear on who your niche is, i.e. you know who those people are who want and need your services, but are you providing the solution to their problems in the way that they want?

If your products, programs, and/or services are not selling as well as you thought they would it could be there’s a mismatch between what your market wants and what you’re providing them with. In other words, are you providing the solutions based on what YOU think the problems are rather than what your target market wants? And how do you find out?

The answer is simple… market research!

When you think ‘market research’ it conjures up all sorts of images of telephone surveys, sending out questionnaires, and standing in the street accosting people to ask them questions (yes – I used to do this type of market research many years ago when I worked for a management consultancy practice J ), and as a solo business owner it is crucial that you do your own ‘market research’ to find out what makes your target market tick, what keeps them awake at night, and what they’re really struggling with.

This process needs to be done on a continual basis – never stop asking your target market what they want – so that you can constantly provide the solutions to their problems.

Today, I’d like to share with you three simple strategies for conducting your own market research (that doesn’t involve standing around in the street!), and how you can put these strategies onto autopilot so that you’re constantly gathering information from your market. All of these have worked very well for me over the past few years.

1. Ask via your sign-up page. When someone signs up to your list, don’t just get their name and email address, ask them what their biggest challenge is too. This is something I’ve done for many years, and in fact you would have seen this yourself when you signed up for this newsletter. I have a specific question that asks: What is YOUR biggest office headache? Feel free to adapt this question for your own needs, i.e. what is your biggest [fill in the blank] when it comes to [fill in the blank].

2. Follow-up with an autoresponder. Once someone has signed up to your list, create an autoresponder that goes out a few days later and asks the same question again. Very often people may not have answered the question when they signed up to your list, and sending them an email a few days later will elicit a reply from them.

3. Create an annual or semi annual survey. At least once a year it’s a good idea to survey your readers and ask them several more in-depth questions. You’ll want to find out what their biggest problems are, what it is they want to learn more about, plus how they want to learn, or how they want their problem solved. For example, you might find your readers prefer home study courses to teleclasses, or would like more interactive programs from you. Putting together a survey is really simple, especially if you use a service such as Survey Monkey. They do the analysis for you, so you get really valuable data.

However, for the data you get through steps 1 and 2 above, analysis isn’t as automatic. Simply gather together all of your data and go through it periodically (at least twice a year) to see what your reader’s problems are. You don’t even need to be a statistician to figure it all out. Just print off all the responses and read through them, noting any common themes as you go along.

By combining all of this data, and implementing your market research strategy so that it runs on autopilot, you can then use this information to put your products and services together so that you’re providing solutions to your target market’s problems in the way that they want and need.

Remember, you are providing your market with what they want and need, not what you think they want and need.