I wandered lonely as a customer

If your staff are the backbone of your business, then your customers are its lifeblood. Together they make any company tick or sick….

Taking care of your customers ensures your business has a good reputation and is likely to be recommended. If you have a premium product but don’t back that up with excellent customer service, your chances of success are diminished.

Not taking care of your customers, does it really matter..? Do customers get lonely or fed up, do they really take their business elsewhere..?

From Banks to the local Butchers most of us have experienced the good, the bad and the seriously awful. There is a thin, sometimes fragile, line that connects the Leaders or Owners of a business with the staff at the front line and through them to the customers. Many things can happen to that line, it can break or get tied into knots and then customers have the “face bovvered” response to look forward to… And the stats show a fair old percentage do move their customer elsewhere

On the positive side here’s an example of that little known high street brand M&S going that extra mile for one of its customers, well one of its staff actually...

Christine Baxter wrote, in verse, to M&S complaining about the closure of her store in Grantham. She was very surprised that the reply to her complaint came back in verse, penned by one of the customer service team. M&S’s Alex Hawkins wrote: “I certainly don’t intend to make light of the issue but, as you’d taken the trouble to write your poem, I felt it was only appropriate for me to respond in a similar fashion.”

Neither poem was a match for Wordsworth, in fact they barely scanned. The little thing that made the big difference was that Alex had gone to a lot of trouble to reply, to reply fully – and in verse..! OK, so M&S can’t keep that store open – it’s not commercially viable – but Mrs Baxter feels she has been listened to and that turned a complaint into a positive PR story.

Just listening and responding to customers is a huge step towards making them feel valued and encouraging them to remain loyal.

Over the years we have developed and delivered a number of Customer Service initiatives for companies large and small. BMW, Rapid Fit, Sundial to mention just a few. Currently we are updating our generic or “pre-designed” offering so if you would like to offer your company up as a beta-test site just let us know…

In the meantime – you could enrich your talents as a poet by visiting the Dove Cottage and Wordsworth Museum website - The link to read some of his best works is here