La Porte Biz Blog

An interesting situation happened the other day that validates my earlier blog post about websites and yellow pages. I was visiting one of my clients, a local restaurant, and as I was talking with the owner a young lady came in to pick up an order for her office. When she was given the total she was surprised. The owner came over and went over the order item by item. Then the young lady said, “You mean the prices you have in the yellow pages are wrong?” You see the owner had place an menu page in one of the local yellow page directories 3 years ago. She didn't renew it after it ran the first time.

The owner explained that the directory that the menu was in was 3 years old and gave the young lady a current menu. So you can see, that even 3 year old telephone directories are even being used and can affect your business. With 3 directories in our market, we have trouble knowing which directory is most used (of course the rep of each book will tell you theirs' is most used) and even if your customers and potential customers are using a current directory. This lends to the idea that with a website you are able to keep your customers and potential customers current on you business.

On that same visit, I was presented with an example of poor customer service. The business owner had some issues with a bill for advertising from the local newspaper, In late February she had asked me for my advice on how to handle the situation and I told her to call or write the company with her concerns. She had mentioned that she had talked with her sales rep and the rep never followed up on the problem. So she sent a letter to them in mid March. Yet she still hadn't received any communication from the company. I did ask her if she had received a bill for the advertising for April, as the company has been billing her for the advertising and interest, and she told me that she had received a bill, yet. Still she doesn't know what the status of her account is, because the company has yet to communicate with her that the problem was taken of or to let her know that her letter was receive and they are looking into the situation

What this tells us about customer service is that communication with your customers and follow up are the most important activities in the process. By not communicating and following up with the business owner the company has told her that her problem is not important to them and her business is not important to them. With generating repeat and new business getting tougher, we all must take very customer service issue seriously, by communication and following up with our customers.

If you have any comments to this post, please feel free to do so.

Have a GREAT Week!