Not tough enough yet.
February 18th, 2009
You know things aren’t tough enough for businesses when we send them an opportunity to do a new job and gain a new customer, and they don’t respond. Either they are too busy, couldn’t be bothered, or have no customer service skills at all. Those who don’t follow up on jobs are restricting their wealth potential. Good luck to new tradesmen that go out and make a name for themselves doing the jobs that don’t seem big enough for the larger businesses. Big business often forget, and loose sight of the fact that small jobs lead to big jobs and that a satisfied customer will tell at least 7 friends of their good experience, but news of a bad experience will spread like a disease.
Just so customers don’t think that we’re not doing our job, we are considering sending to those that add a job, a list of businesses that we inform about their request, so they can take note of those that don’t contact them. In these early stages of business we are sending an average of 7 invites to businesses to contact a client. We know how many respond and it’s not a good reflection in some industries. Some are much better than others, but builders, plumbers, concrete rs, electricians and renovators are amongst the worst.
Don’t whinge about there being no work. A little attitude adjustment wouldn’t go astray. Perhaps if business owners thought a client knew they were told about a job, they might be more inclined to actually get of their backside and serve. Not serving or contacting a client is like leaving a customer standing at a counter waiting to be served, while someone sits at a desk a couple of meters away ignoring them. We all have bad customer service stories, and the opinion of the way business is conducted is soured permanently. We could write a book on “How to loose customers in one easy step”
We’re trying to put the customer service as a priority back into business. It’s going to be a long hard battle, but personally I’m sick of businesses that don’t care and I will purposely pay more for good service and let the slack ones know I use their opposition and why. Bring on competition.