Bodine Balasco is an industry-leading Professional Business Speaker who is truly passionate about helping his client groups improve the level of service they provide to their customers. He says, “It’s not about great performance… it’s about great performance from the customer’s perspective.”
And it is stunning how often organizations set parameters of great performance for the company, for employees and work teams, without taking the customer’s perspective into account when they do.
As a professional business speaker he also provides principles and tools for helping his client groups shift from a focus on providing service excellence, to a focus on creating customer loyalty. It’s about customer retention and customer referrals. It’s about creating a level of value and service your customers will talk about.
The only real asset any company has, no matter the physical items listed on their balance sheet, is a totally loyal customer. And, of course, we’ve all heard that selling something to a new customer is many times more expensive than selling an additional item or service to an existing customer. This isn’t to say we’re going to discontinue our marketing and all our other efforts to bring in new customers. But it is to say we’re going to become so completely customer-centric in our thinking, our systems, and our behavior, that we’ll be consciously working to use every opportunity possible to turn our new customers into loyal customers. And we’ll continue to devote ourselves to our loyal customers, so they won’t even think of using a competitive vendor.
What we need are systems for constantly gathering specific feedback from our customers, which we then actively use to re-design our systems and procedures to deliver exactly what our customers really want. Another way to say this is… we must make it easy for our customers to complain. In this way you’re actually “bringing your customer into your organization” to help your design it for better performance from their perspective. For companies that do this consistently the results can be remarkable, and the rewards are considerable.
This sounds so obvious, but it requires great discipline and follow-thru to execute properly. It’s part of our human nature to resist customer complaints. In fact, most customers don’t go to the trouble to complain, because they know it won’t do any good. They know it won’t make any difference.
How many times have you attempted to register a complaint as a customer, only to have the employee you’re talking to, respond by defending their company’s action, or, they offer an apology, but they don’t really mean it. Or even worse, they indicate in some way – sometimes even verbally — “there’s nothing they can do about it.”
But who can blame them? If they’ve not been trained in how to handle customer complaints — and customer anger — it’s just way too uncomfortable to do so. But those customer complaints contain the valuable information – from the customer’s true perspective – that the company needs, to make adjustments and re-design their procedures, so they can serve the customer the way the customer wants to be served.
Bodine is a professional business speaker who conducts a lot of training for his corporate clients. One of the techniques he teaches, is an 8-step procedure for turning an angry customer into a loyal customer. Developed from behavioral research at the University of Texas at El Paso, this technique really works. And what’s more, when employees learn to use this technique, they really can turn angry customers into loyal customers. This is very empowering for employees, and can make a real difference for companies.
Loyal customers buy more products and services, at a much cheaper cost to you. And, cultivated properly, with effective follow-up techniques, your loyal customers can and will provide you with a steady stream of new business leads.
If you’re having an important meeting or you’re planning to implement a customer-focus training program, to improve retention and obtain referrals, you’ve found a professional business speaker who can help you succeed: Bodine Balasco.