Customer Service is key!

Customer Service is key!

Be helpful, be supportive, always!

I cannot stress enough just how important customer service is! If you want to get customers, then you're going to need to put yourself out to impress them! It's not just about answering their questions and leaving it at that! It's about being persuasive, and the only way you can "persuade" a person to become your customer is to make them think "Wow! They're good!". Okay, you've answered their question, but go the extra mile and say "Can I help you with anything else?".

And don't be lazy! If you get a request for help, but you're in the middle of watching a fascinating TV program, sacrifice the TV program and go and help your customer! Don't procrastinate in other words. Customers don't like waiting, and when they're made to wait they start to lose interest, rapidly. This especially applies to the particularly impatient customers, such as myself. You can, after all, catch up on that TV program at a later date. They'll likely show it again anyway, but there are always services such as the BBC iPlayer where you can watch bygone shows. You cannot catch up on a customer you lost because you were too lazy to assist them!

Providing 24 hour support is not always possible, especially if you're new and have little staff. But as well as being demanding, customers are also very fair. They will understand your situation and won't expect you to provide 24 hour support to start with. So long as they get a reasonable standard of customer service from you they'll be content with that. But you must be reasonable! If you really don't have enough time on your hands then don't bother starting your own company! Not unless you can afford the staff to take care of the customer service for you, which believe me, can be costly.

Running a business without first understanding the principles of maintaining it is like walking into the Dragon's Den with a cardboard box on your head! It simply doesn't work!