Customer Service: Key to Success

Two different articles that I read today reinforced the same message: the importance of good customer service practices for ensuring repeat sales and retail success. In today’s competitive marketplace, maintaining a high level of service is more important that ever before, whether you are doing business online, in your brick-and-mortar store or both. 

The Dallas Morning News reports that "Overall satisfaction with the online retail experience is down almost 3 percent from last year, according to ForeSee Results’s annual Top 100 Online Retail Satisfaction Index."

ForeSeeResults is an Ann Arbor, MI, based company that measures e-commerce customer satisfaction. Its CEO Larry Freed stated, "Online retailers picked a bad time to drop the ball, and if they don’t shore up customer satisfaction, things could get even more bleak." He went on to note that today’s customer service levels could affect "future sales online and offline, loyalty, retention and return visits."

This is the one critical element that small independent retailers have long been aware of: how you conduct your business today, may affect your business in the future. They pride themselves on service and style that sets them apart from their larger big box competitors. And keeping up these appearances is something that they should never forget. 

This lesson is something the Circuit City seems not to have learned or in the very least, seems to have forgotten, according to Joel Spolsky of Inc. In his article "Why Circuit City Failed, and B&H Thrives, he notes "Many companies that have gone bust didn’t die because of the recession. They failed for one reason: They treated customers poorly." Spolsky discusses his own personal experiences and clearly illustrates the value placed on knowledgeable salespeople and how the service that they provide helps to ensure customer satisfaction and the loyalty that keeps customers coming back to shop again and again.