Be Thankful for Your Customers...or....Customers = Revenue

**Excuse my slang in advance**

Dissin' your customers seems to be a burgeoning trend among employees. It is not solely constrained to the Gen X and Gen Y crowd, oh no! I have observed it with Boomers as well who do not seem to appreciate that the customer is the very reason for their having a job.

So, stop, STOP! I say and give thanks for your customers. After all, if you don't appreciate them, someone else will. It takes very little, but here are some ideas:

Thank You Notes

Thank Your Employees

And by the way, thank you, Becky Carroll, for your awesome blog Customers Rock, with many inspiring ideas. Visit Becky and join in her discussions.

Thanks for reading,

Brandon

A Thank You Goes a Long Way

Recently, I wrote about Thanking Your Customers and being Thanksgiving, reflected upon this novel idea and thought about all the interactions that we have daily and what happens when Thanks You's are given freely.

This was a little hard to wrap my thoughts around, but the basic thought was that the more I thanked someone at the close of an interaction, the more personal the exchange became. I do this naturally most of the time and I have been noticing that the more genuine the Thank You becomes, the more smiles occur and (hopefully) the better that person's day will be.

This is a very simplfied version of Pay It Forward (the movie, not the Ben Frankline debt reduction program), but it works. Try thanking your co-workers, your family members, your boss and those who provide you with customer service. Let me know how it works and thanks for reading.

Brandon

Customer Service Tip #4 - Stand Out!

I am a huge Kirk Weisler (www.kirkweisler.com) fan. If you have the opportunity to hear him speak, buy a ticket, sneak in with the staff, just do whatever you have to in order to listen to this man. Kirk is a big advocate of reading. As in books. Not the Internet, not magazines, but old school books. If Kirk is correct, and also my initial research (both online and from talking to people over the past few years) , about half of Americans never read another book after high school.

Based on this number, if you read one book after age 18, you are ahead of the pack. As Kirk explained, the bar is set so low that all you have to do is lift your feet a few inches off the ground and you are over the hurdle. Now, if you read (gasp!) one book per decade, you are practically on fire. And if you could manage (hold on here), one book per year, you are a Rock Star!

This week, I was reading Becky Carroll's Customers Rock (customersrock.wordpress.com) and found that her post "Making a difference for customers" reminded me of Kirk's presentation. Customer Service is at an all-time low. It really takes so little to stand out and provide excellent customer service.

The basic tenets of Customer Service are not that hard and yet, as a whole, seem to be disappearing. So, if you and your team / company are moderately concerned for your customers, you are way ahead of most. And, if you really dig in and take care of your customers, you will stand out. It's that easy, folks.

Thanks for reading,

Brandon

Customer Service Zen...become really good at your job

Today was a free worldwide tele-seminar on personal branding - http://www.personalbrandingsummit.com/. Take a minute to visit the site, I am told that soon, podcasts will be posted of all 24 of the sessions.

I was able to listen to several of the speakers, among them Debbie Weil (http://www.debbieweil.com/, and Phil Gerbyshak (makeitgreat.typepad.com). My takeaway from today's speakers is that we can, should and are all branding ourselves constantly. For our work, that means that we are creating an image of ourselves in the minds of our customers.

For myself, I have worked very hard with my team (both up and down the chain) to brand ourselves as a customer focused team. This encompasses not only responding to issues that happen, but also a constant nurturing of our customers to "check in" and to communicate frequently so that they know us and trust us.

Specific things that we do are visiting them periodically (drop in or scheduled), periodic "touch base" meetings, ad hoc calls, emails and thank you cards (an idea from Phil Gerbyshak) and in general, making sure that we are more than "just someone to call when things go wrong."

The feedback over time has snowballed into something truly wonderful. I'm not sure if we are quite to the level of Raving Fans, but we feel as though we are on the right track.

Feel free to use any of these techniques and I would love to hear from you on ideas you have tried.

Thanks for reading,

Brandon