SatE: CUSTOMER SERVICE AND CUSTOMER LOYALTY (part 3)

Becoming a trustworthy advisor

For an entrepreneur to become respected and successful the entrepreneur has to attain the fundamental knowledge they need to become successful. This knowledge can be attained either through experience or training and education. A good entrepreneur should be able to pass that knowledge and skills down to their workers. An entrepreneur should be able to understand major concepts and should be flexible with ideology this means an entrepreneur should be open minded. A good entrepreneur should be skilled in a variety of business areas and should be able to give honest advice to customer as well as internal customers. An entrepreneur should have the relevant characteristics to be in the position of advisory this is because they will have the experience to interact with people. An entrepreneur should have good PR skills because this would help them communicate to new customer

Attributes of an advisor

• good communication skills
• good interpersonal skills
• organised
• honest and professional
• experiences
• multi-skilled

If an entrepreneur exercises these qualities in an advisory position it is easier for customers to become closer to the firm especially if the advice is beneficial to the customer, this would increase the prospects for customer loyalty and repeat business. This is also exclusively important for the entrepreneur because this would boost the reputation of the entrepreneurs which will open doors to more opportunity. An entrepreneur has to ensure that their business can be trusted by customers that is why it is important for an entrepreneur to install polices that guarantee good advisory services. The firm should also be secure about enquires and should abide by the data protection act 1998. 

Companies such as UCAS and Debenhams have put in place areas on their website where customers can securely communicate to and from the firm either asking for advices or suggesting something. Another way in which the firm could increase the comfort of the customer is by keeping  a clear line of communication with the candidate by telling them how and where their information is being processed. Firms usually do this by sending letters to the prospective candidates. For example UCAS applications online:

This site has been secure when retrieving personal information as well as any applications, the site also offers the candidate or applicants the opportunity to track the progress of their information, requests and updates. This is done by keeping the candidate as a member instead of just a random person patronising the forum.

Another example would be Debenhams which makes all its staff and applicants a member before applying so that once they do apply the have a record of the candidate and can constantly communicate any kind of vacancies without the trouble of constantly applying

Entrepreneurs should be able to back up their policies on good advisory service with good results, so feedback is very important the firms should always give feedback on quires and should always offer the customers a chance to reply in acquisition

This firm has made sure they have replied all my enquires on time and have kept me up to date with my order

Exceeding the expectations of customers

The most rewarding aspects and influence that an entrepreneur could have on a business is to build the firm up in a way that would promote exceeding the customers’ expectations. This would include a lot of marketing. Marketing is the anticipation, identification and satisfying of customers wants and needs profitably. Once the entrepreneur has established what the customers actually want from the firm. The entrepreneur should be able to plan how to exceed those wants and needs, either using various strategies such as price cutting or quality service. Company for example Tesco have done so by doing various activities to wow customers. Another good way to wow customer would be by improving customer service standards in the firm, this can be done if the internal customers are trained to practice customer service on a high level of competency.

Training and how it helps the company meet needs and expectations

The staff should have policies  which they can go by ethically to improve and add value to the customers visit to the business. The internal customers should be trained to treat external customers with the respect they expect to receive. Staff should make it a priority to achieve all the objectives of the customers service department, has that corresponds to building up an industry key success factor, for example; Tesco’s main objective is,” creating value for customers, to earn their lifetime loyalty.” That is they’re strategic vision. The staff must be able to manage the resources intensively to optimise the level of service given to their customers that is why it is imperative for the company to train the staff on site as well as offsite if necessary, to familiarize the staff with the firm and all its conduct. 

This training may be induction training or experience based training. The company could offer customer care training as well as a customer care scheme, which concentrates on the company as a whole and the needs of the customers’ rather than the needs of the company and management. The business could also offer external training which could be expensive; this training could be equipping the staff with the relevant skills to tackle changing situations, general ethic and human relation skills, problem solving and many other specified skills. These skills would help, build a pleasant environment in which the customers would feel free to explore the business fully encouraging the customers to spend more time when visiting the, for example when a customer is moving around the business, they might be expecting assistance from staff, so staff should be aware of this, contrary to that the staff encroach on the customers personal space.

Internal customers need to be able to apply their skills to internal customers within the business to satisfy their co-workers and to maintain a healthy working environment; the internal customers’ have expectations just as external customers and the staff should be able to identify these expectations and cater for them sensibly, this could then improve the productivity of the staff and also keep staff happy, this always reflects to the external customers; for example if the internal customer has been annoyed by another member of staff they may take that out on an external customer there for causing the company to possibly lose that customer. If the internal customers were happy about their work place, they would tend to take that enthusiasm to their external customers, creating a pleasant transaction for the external customer. (Sourced: www.wikipedia.com customer service). Bloomsbury should also cater different type of customers. This means that the company should consider that different groups of the customers that will patronize the company different groups such as:

• Children 

• Special needs (these people that have unique requirements from the business) 

• The physically handicapped and disabled 

• The mentally handicapped, 

• The deaf (hearing-impaired), 

• The blind (visually–impaired), 

• Foreign customers (none English speaking) customers 

The company should be able to provide for these types of customers (see 1.2a). The staff should be sensitive to the needs of these groups by the use of signage and pictures with sound communication (see 1.2b). (Sourced; Michael Fardon, Glynis Frater, John Prokopiw business pg135). The company should achieve or meet its charter (a code of practise, published document). Most medium/large companies have a code of practise at which they go by, for example Tesco’s,” we treat customers they way we would like to be treated”. Since the companies industry success factors are constantly changing the management should be very good at their job. According to covey’s seven habits of highly effective people the management should be: 

• Proactive 

• Mindful of the business goals 

• Put first things first

• Thinking positively 

• Analytical  (analysing skills)

• Synergize (working in a team)

• Always looking for improvement

 This is important if the management is going successfully going to supervise the customer service to satisfy customers. The management has to be able keep up to date with work and changing staff requirements as well as minimising stress levels, the management should be active and exemplary. The management must be organised, ambitious, must identify new customers’ needs quickly. Tesco’s management has been able to achieve this by altering, even the smallest issues customers bring up such as Tesco’s innovation on their upgraded ageing weighing scale infrastructure; as Tesco’s service productivity team recognised then need to introduce more modern weighing scale application. Tesco and Conchango developed this technology to suit customer’s needs and by doing so they managed to exceed the customer’s expectations and satisfied the customers fully. The technology helped the company in a number of ways, it increased the efficiency and satisfaction of internal and external customers by integrating with the current system, easy to use for the staff and operating 24 hours a day 7 days a week, keeping accounts and automatically providing information about the stocks of that branch. This gave the management superior speed in ordering new stocks. The intelligent counters enable members of staff with information instantly and customers can choose from a wealth of product options and information.   This ultimately provided a key success factor for the improvement of the customer service. Management has also identified that customers would be attracted to a business that caters for their specific needs. So Tesco has inbuilt:

• Bakeries available with all the commodities that a normal bakery would sell. This includes ordering by bulk, specified services for example birthday cakes.
• Delicatessens are available with free tasting facilities to explore
• Welcome helpers, which they call customer champions, they welcome, familiarise them self’s to the customers, answer to any queries and assist the customers in any way possible.
• Glass hire services for large parties or weddings
• Dispensing pharmacies, they carry out pregnancy tests, advice on healthcare and NHS dispenses in the dispensing stores.
• Free phone services to call taxies at selected stores.
• Special offers to encourage the customers to patronize the stores more often.(Sourced:www.tesco.com/customerservices/custServAroundTheStore.htm)

To enable the customer service department to satisfy the needs and expectations of the customers, they would have to analyse the customers demographically. I suggest Bloomsbury should identify the business’s dependent path (how the business got to its current status), analysis its service capabilities (the resources that give the business initiative to do go further) and strategise the staff to successfully meeting these customer expectations.