The Rule of 1% is simply defined as improving your customer service one percent at a time. Before you can do this, you must perfect your consistency or this growth will never be realized. One percent may seem small, but if you approach the vision for your company with baby steps, you have the potential to achieve a substantial increase over a solid period of time. Remember, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.
Avoid doing too much at once or you will set yourself up for failure. Focus on the confidence gained by you and your employees when your business steadily improves one percent each week. By the end of a year, you will have improved more than 50%!
While rules and standards are necessary for growth, always be flexible with your best customers. Most clothing retailers only allow a set number of items into a dressing room to reduce the risk of shoplifting, however, that blanket rule generally restricts the large percentage of people who do not shoplift and are not a risk to your business. Flexibility is the key to what you deliver to your customers, and consistency is the key to how you deliver it.
The bottom line is customers rely on you to deliver what you promise. If you spend too much on bulky advertising that promises more than you are capable of delivering, even your best intentions will unravel quickly, and you will fail.
Focus on your vision and the baby steps you can take to elevate your satisfied customers into Raving Fans.
I hope you have learned plenty about good customer service and how it is essential to your overall success. If you need help with any of the steps we’ve gone through over the last four lessons, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me for assistance.
In upcoming posts we will be exploring strategies of bagging the big clients and how to retain them.