How to Learn Customer Service Without Causing Much Damage to Your Business

A mistake in customer services can really mess things up for your company. Practically any business specialist will tell you that. And they are right.

A simple misunderstanding between you and the client, your wrong reaction to his angry complaint or over promise and under delivery may have a downward spiral effect on your company. Not only you may lose a client and any potential future income for your business but it may also damage your reputation.

It it s a known fact that if a client is happy with your service, he MIGHT tell a friend about it. But if you messed up, you can be almost sure that he WILL tell at least 5 or 10 of his friends about that.

And even if your mistake was not that serious for the client to complain to everyone he knows about it, he might still classify you as unprofessional and give such opinions about you to anyone who asks.

By all means, this is not the best position for your business to be in.

But here is the thing, how can someone who is just starting out, with no experience in working with clients, someone who is only beginning to build up his business and is on his way to develop a client base can learn customer service? Especially if the only way to learn it is by practice (and making mistakes at that)?

This is a serious problem, won’t you agree?

In fact it is a vicious circle, you can’t make mistakes in customer service but the only way to learn it is by making mistakes and finding out what works for you and what doesn’t. It’s crazy.

Naturally you can (and should) read as many customer service books as possible, check out advice from fellow business people, bloggers and attend business functions where you can discuss it with more experienced business owners. But unless you dip your finger in the water you will never learn how to implement all that knowledge.

I was in the same position when I started my second company 6 years ago. I was delivering services and had to learn how to deal with clients so that will want to work with me again. In my first company (remember, the one that failed) I made some serious customer service mistakes, especially when it came to my products returns and complaints so I knew how serious all this can get.

Luckily, a friend on mine gave me a piece of the most useful advice on how to learn customer service without causing too much damage to your business and today I want to pass this on to you.

How to learn customer service without causing much damage to your business

When you are starting up you have no clients, fact. So your first task is always to find someone who will trust you to give you work. And slowly, bit by bit you build up a client base and your business grows, simple. During that process, when you work with firstly one, then few and finally many clients, you learn how to service them, how to offer the best support and so on. And as I mentioned already, the only way to learn it is by testing out various things, and making mistakes too. That’s just how this works.

So the advice my friend gave me was to always start working with the least important client I could think of and slowly build my way up to the best ones.

Why? Because those least important ones usually have the smallest reach in your industry and therefore, even if you make a mistake, firstly, it might not matter that much and secondly, even if it does, those clients will not be able to spread the word about it too far.

And it makes sense if you think about it.

Naturally we would all love to be working with any of the Fortune 500 companies (or whatever big companies are in your corner of the world). They are the guys with real money and they are not afraid to spend them. Having such clients on your clients list means even more business as they add value to your portfolio. Basically if you do a good job with them, you have a business for life.

However, imagine what happens if you do a bad job with them? Well, you might not be crossed out for life but it may cause some real damage to your reputation in their circles. Certainly not the best position to be in.

But what about working with the small company no one knows about? Someone possibly like you, someone who is just starting out? They may not have a big client base themselves, they certainly will not have a huge budget but they will be more likely to forgive, or oversight your mistakes. And even if they won’t, even if they decide to tell whoever they know about your error, their reach and market position is not that strong to cause you much damage anyway.

What I did with this information?

1. I made a list of 200 clients I wanted to work with. They were all qualified prospects based on the market positioning for my business (they were all in the same industry and located in the region where I wanted to primarily work. I also knew that they need my services and knew whom to talk to inside those companies about my services). Why I went for 200 on my list? Primarily because I live in a small country and the industry I worked in wasn’t that big. For you it might be a thousand or whatever number you will pick actually, it really doesn’t matter as long as you have a list ordered from best to least important.
2. I started approaching them from the bottom of the list. And I did it in an “inverted pyramid” way. So first I approached only 1 or 2 companies. Then 5, then 10 and so on until I was sending out many email cold calls a day. I would focus on the group I am approaching until I knew who in it was be interested in working with me. Naturally only tiny percentage of this list converted into buying customers but the reason I started off with a small number was that I wanted to focus entirely on them. I wasn’t hugely experienced with sales and I wanted to start off slowly to be able to learn as much as possible along the way (and make as little mistakes in that regard too).
3. Until I reached the middle of the pyramid, I would be open and clear about the fact that I am a start up and I am learning business. Usually it takes couple of months or more before you reach the middle of your list (it was nearly a year for me) so I had the time to gain enough experience. The reason why I was open about being a new business was that I wanted them to treat me like one, to be more open themselves to anything I might not know about business yet.

Naturally the above was not the only client base building strategy I used. I also did a lot of networking at that time and I joined a lot of business organizations like my local chamber of commerce and did many other things. However the above strategy was my main system for gaining highly targeted customers for my business, the ones that perfectly fitted my ideal client description and needed my services badly.

And it worked.

I made a lot of mistakes with my first clients, I lost some of them because of that but I learned quite a lot about what I should and should not be doing. I also had a chance to test in practice all the stuff I have read in business books (tip: don’t believe all that they say, half of this is utter rubbish. The only problem is, you need to discover yourself which half) and I learned what worked for my business.

How does the above system relate to customer grading?

Before I go I want to touch on this briefly. Couple of weeks ago I wrote about the value of customers and I believe some of you might wonder how these two systems relate to one another.

Well, actually they don’t. The above system is really for gaining your first customers, the ones that you will be learning how to deal with clients on whereas customer grading is really used when you have an established client base and need to review it from time to time to see which clients you should focus on mainly.

Image by Fllickr user, mlibrarianus distributed under creative commons license.