Effective Customer Care

Effective Customer Care is an essential guide to creating excellent customer service that will not only satisfy your customers and prompt orders, but also cement customer relationships and develop loyalty... and thus increase profits.



You will find out what really goes through a customer's mind when they look to purchase a product or service, and what might turn them away without you even realising it. If you have to handle complaints or problem solve you will be shown a robust and systematic approach to reduce these occurrences. In servicing your customer you will often need to get cooperation from others within your organisation, be it members of your team or those in other departments. Effective Customer Care will show you how to do this. And finally, you will learn how to ensure that you keep your customers loyal, and build an ongoing business relationship with them.



Pat Wellington includes every aspect of the customer care process including how to: understand what the customer wants, not what you think they want; stop losing business and gain market share; motivate team members to offer a value added service to customers; improve the level of service offered; get a better level of service from internal customers and build long term relationships with customers and suppliers. It is written without jargon and includes international case studies from UK, Scandinavia, USA the Gulf and Singapore.

About the author
About this book
Introduction
1 The fundamentals of customer care
Introduction
The six satisfaction elements
First contact with an organisation: the 'moment of service truth'
Exceeding expectations and adding value
2 Getting to know your customer's needs and requirements
Introduction
Where to gather your information
Benchmarking
3 Creating the environment for customer care to flourish
Introduction
Style of leadership
The framework to monitor and measure performance
4 Effective communication with customers and colleagues
Introduction
Barriers to communication
Breaking down communication barriers
Putting it in writing
E-mail and video conferencing
Communication on the telephone
Face-to-face contact
5 Breaking down inter-team and inter-departmental barriers
Introduction
The internal customer
6 Complaints, problem solving and quality improvement
Introduction
Performance response standards
Resolving problems; quality-improvement activities
7 Building long-term customer relationships
Introduction
Incentives and loyalty schemes
How to develop an ongoing business relationship with customers
Referrals; the active reference principle
Effectiveness of corporate activities in building long-term customer care relationship
Finally, finally