Why Business Owners Should Not Focus on Customer Service

Introduction

In this video I would like to sort of get your minds focused on, as business owners and entrepreneurs, not focusing on customer service. You heard me right, business owners should not focus on customer service.

As entrepreneurs and busy businesses, customers are the lifeblood of the business, but as an entrepreneur, you should be focusing on customer focus, not customer service. Let me explain. Please bear with me. It may sound strange, maybe people watching this say, Wow, customer service is king.

Customer Focus

Well, that's how as a business owner or entrepreneur, you need to be focusing on customer focus, not customer service. What do I mean by that? Customer focus is the what and the why. What do you do and why do you serve your customers? That's what happens in the boardroom.

That's what happens and that's what needs to happen when you, as a business owner, are plotting out and putting a strategy in place to look after your customers. It really starts with your core values. If you don't have your core values sorted, again you can jump over to blog.6teen30.com There's a little post about how to craft those there.

• Look at your core values.
• Look at your type of customers and the environment you make.

As a business owner, what do you do?

• Why do you look after your customers?
• Why is it important? 

Start to understand that if you don't look after your customers, what is the consequence of that?

• They're going to leave.
• They're going to deal with the competitors.

Loss of financial revenue. All of the obvious stuff. There are no new things here, guys. I'm sort of just restating that to put the ticks in the checkboxes so you're clear about it. They're going to go elsewhere for sure.

Start thinking about what is the cost if the business cannot look after its customers? Also, what is the cost to acquire new customers? Once you've got that clear, the cost of acquisition, cost of onboarding, the cost of training new people. Whatever that is. Then look at the why.

Why, as a business, should they deal with you? There's a great quote that I credit to Dan Kennedy if anybody follows Dan Kennedy at GKIC. If you're not, well you should be doing it, that's the first thing.

You can check out more at GKIC.com. Dan Kennedy, guys. Search him on Google. What Dan Kennedy says is a quote, and I encourage you to write this down. Why should I, your prospective customer, choose to do business you over every and any available option available to me?

When you start to think about that saying that Dan Kennedy comes up with, shortened and summarised. Why should your prospective customers deal with you over anybody else? To really look at that, maybe you get a better guarantee, which is product features. It's all about the people. 

• People buy from people.
• People buy from people they know, like, and trust.

Customer Service

Customer service doesn't start when they become customers. Customer service starts at the point of sale, which is marketed before maybe even a salesperson even gets on the phone or maybe attends an appointment. Start with your core values, get those mapped out. What's unique about it?

How do you call out to your customers? Once you've got that done, look at your what. What's it cost you to acquire a customer? Why they should deal with you? That's all boardroom or business management type of discussion.

Once you've got it mapped out, how do you want to be portrayed, be seen, and understood by your customers in your marketing and your sales messages? Once you actually secure a customer, think about that onboarding experience. The day they became a customer, what happened?

How do you deliver over what they've paid for? If you're not already delivering more than you've been paid for, that's a big mistake. You really do need to start thinking that if they paid for one hundred per cent, how can we deliver one hundred and ten per cent?

That's not necessarily by quantity. If you're delivering a hundred pallets of a product, I'm not saying you have to deliver a hundred and ten pallets of product.

• It could be a faster delivery.
• It could be you to upgrade them to the slight next model.

Small cost increases to you, but a significantly large impact of wow for your customers. Once you've got it mapped out the what and they why, and you understand how you're going to deliver it, that's when you bring your team into it and that's when you educate and train them how to deliver that.

That's where customer service comes in. I just want to do a quick recap, guys. As a business owner, as a business entrepreneur, stop looking at customer service and start looking at customer focus, the what and the why.