Customer Relations: Part 4

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When organizations invite me to speak at their conferences or train their team members, we start with trends that are impacting their customer relationships. Check out these four customer service trends along with some tips for capitalizing on them to boost your business.

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Retain versus blame

This may seem counterintuitive – in today’s increasingly litigious society, it’s more important than ever that organizations admit fault and make amends the moment they have a service slip up. It’s not just that they could be sued and lose. Smart service providers have done the math and know that it’s much less costly to do the right thing for customers than to have disgruntled customers trashing your brand. Especially when social media messages can quickly go viral (an apt term since it effectively gives your brand a disease that makes other customers want to avoid you). The good news is that customers are wonderfully forgiving towards companies who quickly own their mistakes, and who do something to address the customer’s hassle.

The bottom line : When we combine these trends we see the emergence of a theme. Growing your business with today’s customers means you and your team members need to be easy to do business with. That means coming up with unique business processes that make buying from you easier. It means narrowing the choices so that buying decisions are easier. And it means training your team members so that – even when things go wrong – they recover your customers’ trust, quickly and easily.

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This article is based on the bestselling book, Becoming a Service Icon in 90 Minutes a Month by customer service strategist and motivational speaker, Jeff Mowatt. For more information, visit JeffMowatt.com .