Business Sphere

As customers we demand good, if not excellent, service from the companies that we buy a product or a service-be it from a grocery store, a bookstore, a clothing store, a tailoring shop, a sauna and spa, or whatever.

However, many businesses today seem to have lost focus of their reason for existence: satisfied customers who believe they are getting their money’s worth and will come back to buy a second time, a third, or the ninth time.

From the business point of view, there are companies, big or small, and in all industries, that manage to do a superb job of attending to customers’ needs while also meeting their own growth objectives and making profits.

I remember that when I was in a graduate school of management some years ago for my Master’s degree, I read an excellent article written by Jeffrey Margolies, an American author and management consultant, about excellent companies. I can’t forget the lessons that I have learned from that article, because I had notes about it which still exist to this day.

According to Margolies, no matter how effectively you believe your company delivers service, a revaluation of your systems and procedures could prove useful to make your company a truly service company. Here are the important tips to follow to achieve service excellence in the market, thus also achieving business growth and profitability.

1. Next to the quality of the product itself, service is your greatest key to profitability. Good service is your next sale in the making. It is a rare business indeed that owns such a lock on its market that a dissatisfied customer cannot shop elsewhere. Frequently, it is only the quality of the service that separates one product from its competitors. Service is the key to profit, not a cost of doing business.

2. No matter what your company does, yours is a service business. Service is part of every contact between your company and a prospect or customer. Ultimately, it affects not only how purchasers feel about your company but also their perception of the value and quality of the product you deliver.

3. Good service is value added for your customer. Customers make buying decisions based on their perceptions of the product or service extra value. Especially when products or services offer similar features -as is true with cars, packaged goods, bank loans, computers, grocery items — good service is the margin of extra value that exerts a positive influence on customer behavior.

4. Service creates sales opportunities. Your customers bought from you in the first place, and not from your competitors, because they believed your product offered real, tangible advantages. It’s your job to help the customers see the value of the products or services that you offer, to make the sale.

5. When it comes to service, later isn’t soon enough. Service is a real time activity and real time means real money. Whatever the customers need, they need it right away and they want it now. Therefore, whatever the service your company provides, doing the job right is just half the battle. It is equally important to set up systems that help you and your employees respond to a customer’s needs as soon as they arise.

In the final analysis, service excellence is a key success factor in business, in any business. It is only by providing good service to the customers that companies can become excellent companies, attending to the needs of the customers first while meeting growth and profit objectives as a result of that service.