Debbie Mayo-Smith: Five customer experience gems

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1. Give A Thank You They'll Enjoy
As shared with me by Sue Roberts; Woinarski & Co, North Sydney, Australia

Often when a client has a meeting in our office - we give them a 'coffee voucher' as they leave to enjoy a coffee 'on us' at the coffee shop located in the lobby area of our building.

It creates 'goodwill' with our clients and lifts our profile with our fellow tenants. Our clients 'love it'& it becomes a 'talking point' amongst their friends.

2. Categorise Your Customers
Become a customer service maven

One of the least known functions in Outlook is Categories, a keyword or phrase that you can assign to a Contact (or email, appointment, task.) Better yet, you can assign multiple categories to each item.

Categories are utterly brilliant for customer service

Why? Because you can then finely target specific customers. By creating industry, occupation, interest, purchase, service categories (for example) all you need to do is sort by category to get the slim slice you're after.

How do I create a Category?

You'll find a little square of colours on the Home Ribbon in any of the Outlook programs. Click it, select Add New and just write in the name of your category.

In Gmail it's called Groups and you'll find the ability to add a contact to a group with a small clickable link on the bottom left of the contact.

3. Personalise with a Click
Impressing en-masse is easier than you think!

You know you can communicate with you customers by sending one email to all of them. When you put their email details in the To or CC address field, everyone will see whom the email is going too. If you use Blind Carbon Copy (BCC), the distribution list is hidden, but not personally addressed to them.

You might not know (until now) that you can easily do a personalised email merge where each recipient is individually addressed and sent their own email (merging any information you have in Outlook Contacts or your database). You can send 20 different emails to 20 different customers at once. Or 100. Or 500.

You'll find personalised email merge in two places:

Outlook> Contacts Home Ribbon>Mail Merge
Word>Mailings Ribbon
Gmail - if you use Google Drive, Search the internet for an add-on email merge app so you can integrate Gmail and Google Docs.

4. Never Dear Mrs. Tom Jones Again.
Save hours splitting first and last names apart

How can your customer's be impressed if you address communications with dear client, no greeting or their name in full?

Solve the problem of splitting first and last names apart with the fabulous, but poorly known function in Excel called text to columns. Found in the data menu, it will split information based on the criteria you specify such as space, comma, colon...

Is your customer information not in Excel? It's easy to import it from another program. Save the original as a text or CSV file and import into Excel.

5. How Your Company Should View Customer Service Mistakes
As told to me by David Maher; Celebrity Speakers; Sydney Australia

My experience is that the Customers who have the highest rating on Customer satisfaction and loyalty with Celebrity Speakers, are not the customers that have never had a problem with our company, but the customers where a problem has occurred, and we openly and honestly acknowledge the issue, try to fix the problem and communicated the changes that we have implemented to never let the problem occur again.

Written by Debbie Mayo-Smith one of Australasia’s most in-demand speakers, trainers and bestselling authors. Debbie works with companies that want more effective staff. For more tips and business ideas sign up for her free monthly newsletter http://www.successis.co.nz/newsletternzh.html