Every company under the sun seems to be attempting to receive your business and as a consumer you sometimes feel pressured to sign up for an company credit card to receive benefits, and the countless other ways companies try to either get new costumers or to retain their existing ones. There is only one way however that really seems to work and that is meeting and exceeding your costumer's expectation of your goods and services.
In management you have to understand the fact that meeting and exceeding your costumer's expectations is very important. This could range from a number of things between trying to continually stay on top of your competitors on have the latest technology (i.e. Apple) or something as simple as listening to customer feedback. While this may all seem common sense it has only been recently that companies even cared at all what the customer wants out of their goods or services. It used to be based just on supply and demand if there was enough demand for product x then a company would produce product x. This worked for a time but eventually once there was more regulation that came from the government, more and more people became concerned with quality.
Why is quality so important to a company? Quality helps with the overall production and the fact that it is cost-effective. It cuts down on cost from a standpoint of having less damaged goods going out, which in turns creates better profit. But integrating quality should stem not only to production but to the care one takes when dealing with costumers.
Things you can do to help improve in the area of customer service.
The first thing to realize that there are two types of costumers. Inside and outside costumers both need to be studied. Outside costumers are the ones actually buying your goods or services and her are a few ways to meet and exceed their expectations. You can start by using costumer surveys and actually consider implementing some good costumer ideas. Remember that not all costumers know the operation of a business and are not giving helpful advice, but most try to help. You can give special rewards to costumers for staying with a company for a long time (i.e. memberships) these are just two ideas that I could think of off the top of my head. I’m sure that there are more ways to accomplish this. The kicker is having very skilled and trained employees that can assist and aid the costumer. Let’s give an example from Old Navy. Let's say that a costumer is looking for a specific article of clothing, what if the store doesn't carry it? The costumer asks an employee for help and the employee has many different options to choose from and they start by asking if they could help the costumer check other stores for that article of clothing. They can do a merchandise locater and then call another store to ask them to search for it. If those two ways don't work they tell the costumer to check the online store and give them the specific item number to use. Now doesn't that seem really nice for the costumer? Won't they be willing to come back to the company?
The second type of costumer is the inside costumer, or the employees. They need to have their expectations meet and exceeded as well. This includes treating them like humans not just workers. Allow them to socialize but make sure that they get the work done, and so on and so on. This falls more on the manager to deal with rather than the employees themselves. It is important to focus on what is going on in the work place and see if anything is out of sync, and then it is your job to fix it. Also listen to the employees and see if they have any suggestions to make the work place better. They will have a more vested interest if they were involved in the process.
That is all I have for today class, I hope it was somewhat enlightening and not to rambling but hey they don't pay me for this.
Until next time...
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