Be Relentless in serving your customers;
It’s the Hook for Customer Loyalty

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The key to the success is providing exceptional customer service. I don’t care if you work for a financial company, a retail chain, or a car dealership. If you don’t serve your customers—and serve them well—they will leave you  

Exceptional customer service keeps customers—and their wallets—coming back to you. But there is a critical element of customer service that is often overlooked: You must be relentless in providing your customers with service that is so great they wouldn’t think of spending their money with your competitors.

You and everyone else in your organization—from top executives to frontline employees—must be relentless when it comes to customer service. Being relentless means you are obsessed with providing your customers with the best service possible. It means that you have a propulsive, self-directed passion to continue to learn, improve, and exceed expectations in everything you do. It’s a race without a finish line. And, it’s a reflection of the core principles, beliefs, and attitudes of every employee in a healthy and hugely successful business.

When you are relentless, you make customer service part of your company’s culture by weaving it into every aspect of the organization’s fabric. The first step is to understand the definition of customer service. It’s putting customers first, doing what you say you will do and when you say you will do it, and doing whatever you can to solve their problems with your products or services—and doing it quickly.

Executives at too many publicly held companies make shareholder returns on their investments their top priority. What they fail to realize is that, if the company doesn’t provide products and services that attract and retain customers, your revenues will drop—and so will your profits. You will be faced with spending huge amounts of money in marketing and advertising to replace those customers—much more than it would have cost you to solve their problems and retain their business.  

Being relentless means making customer service a central strategy. That includes training every employee on a consistent basis in the skills they need to serve your customers and giving them the tools to do so. One of those tools is empowerment. It’s imperative that you give them the authority to make decisions that will benefit your customers and to do so quickly, without the need to seek managerial or executive approval.

Speed of thought, action, and consequence are the tools of empowered employees. Identify roadblocks that impede empowerment, including policies and procedures that prevent employees from making decisions quickly and responsibly—and then eliminate them.

It’s also important that you measure the results of being relentless. Track your customer referral rate. How many new customers did you attract because you made some other customers happy? Track social media. How do people talk about your company? Track first contact resolutions. What percentage of customer concerns were resolved with only one point of contact? Track your defection rate. How many customers have stopped doing business with you? That includes “abandoned cart” transactions. It’s imperative that you know where you are so you can take steps to get you to where you want to be.

No one is perfect; we all make mistakes. That’s where service recovery comes in. Service recovery is how an organization owns up to its mistakes, solves problems, provides compensation, and restores customer loyalty. You must listen to your customers, be empathetic, take responsibility for the problem, and do whatever it takes to satisfy the customer.

Make a commitment to be relentless. And remember this: Being relentless in serving your customers will forge your path to success by building your bottom line and long-term growth prospects. If you are relentless in providing extraordinary customer service, you will be successful.