From Susan Ward,
Your Guide to Small Business: Canada.
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There’s no real secret to getting your customers to come back. All you need to do is provide customer service that exceeds your customers' expectations and outshines your competitors' customer service.

Acumen Research Group surveyed more than 1,000 Canadian retail, banking and telco customers to determine what made them behave loyally and what made them leave long-term relationships; 43 percent of respondents abandoned a provider to which they declared themselves loyal because of a negative experience with a staff person, and 30 percent of respondents reported that having the feeling they are not treated as valued customers by the staff has been the main reason for taking their business elsewhere. (“Keep Them Coming Back” by Joan A. Pajunen in Canadian Retailer).

Shiny customer Service is service with a capital “S”, Service that makes your customer feel special, Service that makes him or her want to come back and do more business with your company, and recommend your business to his or her friends.

So how can you provide customer Service that shines? Follow this plan to ensure customer service that will dazzle customers and competitors alike:

1) Determine what makes what you offer special.

Study the competition. Think about their customer service and the customer service you provide. What can you offer your customers that is “better” than the competition? There are sure to be aspects of your customer Service that you can promote as “Special”.

Make a list of all these ideas for providing customer service. If you sell a product, and your competitor doesn’t offer it already, perhaps you can offer free local delivery. If you sell a service, such as bookkeeping or accounting, perhaps you can focus on turnaround times that are faster than your competitors’- providing the good customer service that will give your business the edge.

Sometimes providing customer Service that shines will involve expanding your operations. For instance, you may need to offer to provide your services in customer’s homes to outdo the services the competition provides.

Sometimes providing customer Service that shines will involve revamping what you’ve always done. If you provide a service that involves giving estimates of the job to be done beforehand, and you’ve previously just given estimates to prospective customers orally, you could stress that you provide an estimate in writing and stick to your written estimate. Remember, we’re talking about customer Service here. Lower prices are not service; they’re just lower prices.

Continue on to the next page to read more ideas for providing customer service that will help you outshine the customer service your competitors provide.