So you have setup a new company. The easiest bit was setting up the company formations. You have a great brand, excellent name and website to match. Well done, you have done the easy part of UK company formations. Now it is time for the hard parts of running a company. You need customers in their droves willing to part with their hard earned cash. Once you have the customers through the door, you have an even harder job. You need to keep them. Successful companies retain their customers. The last thing you want is to lose your client base to your competitors because your product or service isn’t up to scratch. So how do you avoid losing customers in this way? Luckily while there might be a hundred and one ways of doing so, there are only really a few main reasons companies lose their customers. Here they are. why I choose to setup company formations England.
My worse pet hate is companies that say they are going to do something, and then don’t deliver. I will give you a real life example- an experience I just had with my broadband provider. In the long run of things, the company has hardly commited a cardinal sin. Fortunately when I don’t have Internet, I see it as a hint that I should be socialising a bit more! On the flip side, some customers will errupt at the slightest piece of bad service.
I am writing right now because I have no Internet connection. It’s my fault because I lost my login information, not my provider’s. I called the company yesterday to confirm the details. They informed me the portal from which they would get the details was down and would be back within an hour. In fact it is still down this morning, but besides the point I was impressed that they said they’d call technical support for me to manually extract the login.They did exactly that- better still they called back within ten minutes (see exceeding expecations below!). Unfortunately I wrote the details down on a piece of paper which a family member decided to bin, so I had to call back again right now. So I called again and as before, I was told I’d be called back in fifteen minutes. After an hour went by I called back up to chase and was told the same excuse. What irritated me is I was clearly told fifteen minutes, and they didn’t live up to that expectation. The lesson to be learnt here- if you tell a customer you are going to do something, make sure you do. Things can go wrong- so just call them and update them. If the company had rung me back as promised after fifteen minutes to inform me there was still a problem, but I would get an update in 4 hours, I’d have gone off and written some more about customer service. Instead I am now irritated.
This shows the importance of managing expectations. I wouldn’t have had a problem if the company had contacted me and told me I would need to wait a day. If they had then fixed the problem quicker than that, I’d have been happy. For the want of a better example, this is why McDonalds are so incredibly successful. When you buy a Big Mac, you know exactly what you are getting. The McDonalds hand book covers everything from how long the burgers are grilled before frying to how much sauce is applied. This makes for very little room for error. It’s not like when you visit a restaurant one evening and the food is magnificent. Then another time you visit and because they are busy, you feel cheated out of your money. Try and set reasonable expectations and then beat them. Never go beyond the expectations you have set.
On the flip side (no burger pun intended) a final word of warning is that you cannot please everyone. In fact, some customers love being a menace! These kind of people love nothing more than a ruck with customer service! In a all seriousness, in 9 years of running different businesses to varying degrees of success, and with customer service from the below par to excellent, I know you cannot please everyone. You will find customers that break everything and then blame you. Get rid of the problemematic customers, and follow the above- look after the important customers.