Treating customers like dirt or selling poor-quality products obviously puts you on the fast track to going out of business. But there are some not-so-obvious mistakes that could lead to you hanging the “Closed” sign in your window.
Here are five things you’ll want to make sure your sales, marketing and service reps aren’t doing that quickly suck the life out of the customer experience — and your business:
1. Breaking promises to customers
New or overambitious employees may make some pretty lofty promises to land demanding customers. The question is: Are those employees fulfilling their end of the bargain?
One way to find out, interview customers after they leave your company to see if they’ve fallen victim to the classic over-promise/under-deliver scenario.
2. Making unprofitable concessions
If your employees are keeping their promises to customers, you’ll also want to make sure those promises aren’t so lofty that they’re making the business relationship unprofitable for your company.
This tends to happen two ways:
- An employee, in an attempt to close a sale, offers concessions to the customer (lower price, free shipping, unlimited warranty, etc.) that subtract from your company’s bottom line, and
- In an attempt to reward a long-time customer for his business, an employee starts to offer him increasingly generous concessions that eventually make the relationship more of a cash train rather than a profit-maker.
3. Failing to apologize for mistakes
Even at the best companies, mistakes will happen and the occasional promise will go unfulfilled. But when those things happen, it’s up to your sales, marketing and service teams to accept responsibility for the mistakes and work to correct them.
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