Part 1, Three Best Ways To Spoil Your Customers.

Each Owner Has Their Own Set Of Trimming Knives

When your customers become spoiled with how well you treat them, they become addicted to using who you are.  It is a good thing to have your customers wanting to come back again.

One thing is for sure, you will not have a lot of competition who will be trying to spoil your customers with improved customer service.  Too many businesses have trimmed away the needed personnel required to increase the time demands they need to devote to increased customer services.  Likely, though, you are faced with the same challenge.  If your budgets are like mine, they are constantly under the trimming knife.



As Good As They Are, Your Employees Have Extra Time Chips To Use

As a result, you will need to move your customer service improvements in areas that do not require large chunks of employee time.  This suggests that whatever you discover to do with your employees to begin spoiling your customers is going to cause a shift in habit patterns each employee brings to work.  Trust me, every one of your employees have habit patterns they perform at work.  In those patterns are hidden jewels of valuable time.  Your trick is to continue to respect the value your employees bring to work but to help them create consistent opportunities for "spoiling" customers with some of those hidden time slots they quietly permit to flow by.  You are now entering to perform one of the great arts to business ownership.  You begin the daunting task of modifying and improving the performance of your staff.  Don't be chicken, here we go.



The trick to making this kind of modification work is to help your employees 'buy in' on the project.  Without the support and holding power from your employees, this project will badly fail.  If you do not have a great working relationship with your staff, it might be time for you to develop a plan to improve your leadership skills.  Mine suck, too.  So there is hope.

Also, if you are a sole proprietor, or a single web-page business...you still need to develop a plan to begin "spoiling" your customers.  Having no employees does not exclude you from the project to develop a great spoiling environment.  Remember, we are trying to make it difficult for our competition to perform as well as we do.  We will be providing an environment for our customers that they feel they need to come back to so they can get spoiled some more.  This kind of work is not very difficult to do, but does require a focus, plan and some maintenance.

Identify Your Leaders

If you have a fair degree of leadership with your staff, you begin this project by describing to them how you envision the need to develop "spoiling" tools that your place of business can offer on a consistent basis to its flow of customers.  Ask your staff to think about it.  See if they have any ideas.  Now leave them alone for some time as they allow that seed of thought to germinate.  This step is vital to improving your leadership.  You planted the seed of thought, now walk away and give it some time.  Good ideas need to germinate, twist and turn, mull around...time to develop some roots.  If you are surrounded with people similar to mine, beware...they will jump at the chance and begin their own version of your vision.  As well as this may seem, it brings with it some of its own challenges.  You do not want to kill their spirit and ambition by controlling how they work the plan.  You may have to learn to accept some of the models of effort they begin to employ.

Give Leadership A Chance



If you are not yet blessed with a staff that will jump and go, bring the idea up again.  This time describe deeper what you envision.  Give more specific details of how you see this concept working.  Then ask them if they have given this idea any thoughts.  Again, let this second effort have time to germinate.  Walk away again.  Each time you work the idea this way watch and pay attention to who your leaders are.  If you have hired some leaders, they will begin to surface.  Watch how they interact with the others.  Do not be so obvious, but this is a great opportunity for you to learn some things about improving your leadership skills and techniques.  The lessons will occur right before your very own eyes...with your own employees.  Pay close attention.

Go ahead with this project.  Start it without knowing how you plan to complete it.  We will spend the next few posts working on this concept.  I like how it is lending valuable lessons to all of the connected steps you will face in making important pattern changes in your business model.  This is far more important than giving you three steps and sending you off into the wilderness to make them happen.  We will reach the three steps, but well after we prepare the soil for proper acceptance, planning and maintenance efforts.  I suspect some of you quietly discovered how weak your leadership might be surfacing.  We do not have the luxury to be employing people in a world where they do what you tell them to do.  I think many of you have already discovered that truth.

We will work on Part 2 next time.  Until then, start this project...even though you do not know where to go or how to do it.  Remember, you are the leader.  That is what leaders do.