How well does your organization treat clients or customers?
Our reader poll today asks: How well does your organization treat clients or customers?
– Extremely well — we take great care of them: 35.17%
– Very well — we treat them better than most other companies: 34.88%
– Well — we do a decent job but could improve a bit: 25%
– Not well — we could treat them much better: 3.49%
– Poorly — I’m surprised we even still have customers: 1.45%
Treat them well or someone else will. It doesn’t take much to lose a customer and we all know how hard it is to acquire them. If your organization isn’t in the top two categories in this poll, you’re creating a large risk to your business. As leaders, we’re responsible for identifying where we’re coming up short in our treatment of customers and quickly fixing those issues. Client service can be very simple to understand but difficult to execute. It all boils down to defining client service principles you should never violate. Make sure you do both as you set the tone for your team to care for one of your most valuable assets.
Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below!
– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC
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These results were originally a SmartPulse poll in SmartBrief on Leadership which tracks feedback from more than 190,000 business leaders. Get smarter on leadership and sign up for the SmartBrief on Leadership e-newsletter.
No I don’t agree; maybe I have a lousy sample of companies I interact with. Truthfully I don’t deal with companies that treat me poorly unless I don’t have a choice – but that is not uncommon at at (ISP, airlines, electric company, mortgage company…).
I intentionally pick companies that are good, but for example with a mortgage it is then sold and I am forced to deal with a bad company…
I am thrilled when a company treats me well (because my expectations have been so beaten down that just not being treated as a huge bother is a rare), but it is rare. Trader Joe’s does consistently. My credit union does. In general restaurants do.
What I have found is that if the executives are paid more than $1,000,000 the company probably treats me very poorly. I don’t think is a cause, but I do think it is correlated. The executives seem to always have room to pay themselves huge salaries but are loath to provide the customers someone that answers the phone or email without wasting tons of the customers time.