So You Think Your Clients Love You

Rather than a New Year's resolution (long forgotten by Super Bowl Sunday), I have a dream for the New Year and beyond. In my dream the green industry as a whole is known for outstanding customer service. In this dream clients rave to their friends about how well they are treated. Employees are thrilled and tell all their friends what a wonderful industry in which to work. Newly hired recruits are overwhelmed by their enthusiastic welcome to the industry.

Sound like a lot of happy talk? Consider the nightmare of poor customer satisfaction. When we are customers, in the face of poor service, we walk away, we hang up the hone, we log off the website and we go elsewhere with our greenbacks. After all the thousands of dollars spent on advertising, marketing, image making, clean equipment, professional office staff, etc., how can you afford not to offer outstanding customer service?

No matter our position in the company, we all have customers. Most of us have external customers (our clients), while others have internal customers (our fellow employees), a coworker who uses the service your position provides for the company. Either way, our companies are nothing without delighted clients. But where does dreamlike customer service start? Recognition of the need for action. After speaking with numerous business owners I am convinced we live in a fog where all our clients are satisfied. Lost in the fog, many entrepreneurs erroneously think that their clients love them. Do you think your clients love you? Consider that you may be deluding yourself.

Do you find it takes more and more each passing year to make the client happy? Do you think you need to do more and more and more to satisfy your clients? Do their demands seem outrageous? If so, the fog may be lifting. Clients who demand more and more service are the norm for companies that offer good customer service. As the basic customer service needs are handled more issues always op up. Great service providers find more and more ways to manager each and every customer service issue before it pop up.

As the old adage goes, "things are never as bad as they seem, but they're not as good as they seem either." As dark as things appear at the moment, they could be worse. Many of us forget the phrase altogether when things are going well; we tend to believe our own "good press," and forget to continue working harder and harder toward client satisfaction.

According to Frederick F. Reichheld as printed in the December 2003 issue of the Harvard Review of Business, referrals are the best indicator of clients satisfaction: "As part of our research into customer loyalty and growth, my colleagues and I looked for a correlation between survey responses and actual behaviour -- repeat purchases, or recommendation to friends and peers -- that would ultimately lead to profitable growth. Based on information from 4,000 consumers, we ranked a variety of survey questions according to their ability to predict this desirable behaviour … The top ranking question was far and away the most effective across industries: How likely is it that you would recommend [Company X] to a friend or colleague? The only path to profitable growth may lie in a company's ability to get its loyal customers to become in effect, its marketing department."