Customer loyalty is built on customer relations.  The front desk clerk, the counter clerk or even the security guards can make or break your business based on the impression they leave with customers.  Whether you are in a service-oriented business, manufacturing, education or health care field, your goal is to make that first impression lasting and gain loyalty from customers.

No matter what type of business you are in, the following are standard guidelines in handling customer relations.

1.  Make the customer feel like royalty when attending to them.  Pamper your customers.  You must have well-oriented and well-trained customer relations personnel to assist them.  Everyone in the selling area or in the place where customers are expected to move around must know their job. Keep your customer relations personnel updated on how to handle customers.  This is proven to be an effective way of keeping customers and getting them to return. Make customers feel like they are part of the company, or a member of your corporate family. Value them.

2.  Handle complaints properly.  Each one of us have been customers of various establishments. We know that a customer is always right - as companies we should stand by that principle.  The basic steps in handling customer complains are: to listen, then validate the complaint and act on it promptly.  The key to handling customer complaint is to act quickly.  It is said that one dissatisfied customer is equivalent to hundreds of thousands of lost sales, word of mouth travels.  Protect the company from losing more because of one complaint.

The performance of the customer relations department plays an integral part in helping the company sell whatever product or service they are offering.  Needless to say, customer relations should be a paramount concern, especially for your front line workers..

It is interesting to sometimes eavesdrop on shoppers and listen to their candid comments about the establishments they visited.  You will definitely hear different comments and points of view.  If a company would like to know the needs and desires of its customers, then conducting a customer survey is one of the best tools to use.

There are 3 areas of customer survey which are all essential for the company to know.

Customer Service Survey

The objective here is to provide the company valuable data from customer feedback.  Management could then improve the service of the company to become more competitive in its field. It could also provide the management team guidelines for strategic planning and decision-making.

Customer Satisfaction Survey

This area concerns the product, services, pricing, and satisfaction with the business relationship.  The details in this survey directly give vital feedback from customers regarding their desires, wants and needs. These data are essential for the growth of the company.  Here, the behavior of the customers is revealed through the answers they give. With it, management could make adjustments to suit the satisfaction of customers.

Customer Loss Review Results

Being able to win back one customer is like winning back a thousand or more.  It is therefore important to know the reasons why the customer has stopped doing business with the company. There is a need to identify the root cause of the problem.  If winning back the customer is no longer possible, it is imperative to take corrective measures so as to prevent future loss of customers.

One way to benchmark the level of satisfaction of your customers is through a customer satisfaction index. One of the leading customer satisfaction indexes in the world is the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The ACSI helps to determine how satisfied consumers in the US are, so that consumer behavior can be understood. ACSI personnel question around 80,000 Americans per year regarding how satisfied they feel about any products and services they may have used for that year. Even the satisfaction of the public with government services is rated by the ACSI.

You may access information about the ACSI every quarter, after survey results have been collected and analyzed by ACSI analysts. Some of those who use the ACSI information are:

• industry trade groups
• market investors
• market analysts
• corporate and organizational decision makers
• and academic researchers.

Ordinary consumers may also opt to read ACSI results so they can be better informed about what products and services to buy the next year.

To get their data, the ACSI personnel conduct telephone interviews based on the Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing system. Respondents are usually randomly chosen and screened first via the sampling method called random-digit dial technique. The ACSI generally concerns itself with customer service satisfaction about over 200 companies that operate in 10 economic areas and 43 industries all in all. Because the ACSI has been proven to be quite reliable and credible, organizations and interest groups from other countries have also begun adopting the ACSI in their countries as well.