In Part 1 of my customer service series, I discussed the importance of building into your business plan mission statement the desire to provide a good product or service. The next step in providing good customer service is to implement customer service guidelines. Be sure you provide enough information about your product or service for the customer to make an informed decision on purchasing before they contact you. Some steps you might take are:

1. Set up a FAQ page to address the most frequently asked questions.
2. Provide a form listing choices if you offer more than one type of service, and allow enough room for comments. Set it up so the questions you might want to ask a new client are already there.
3. Have a policy in place on how email is to be handled. Will you have an autoresponder for first contact and reply to every inquiry in a timely manner? Will you provide an alternate email addy or other information on how to contact your company in the event there's a problem with email? There should be several ways for prospective clients to get in touch with you.
4. Be sure the client's expectations are realistic before you contract to fulfill them. For instance, if you are doing creative work, it is important to say that you are willing to make revisions, but you should put a firm limit on how many or how extensive those revisions will be.

Are you on the same page as your client?

Most of the time, misunderstandings are the reason for having a dissatisfied customer, so let's go over our preventative measures one more time.

• Define clearly what you can provide and how you will deliver it.
• Be sure you understand what your client's expectations are. Confirm their request with a detailed reply setting out what your understanding of the job is.
• Ask them to reply to verify that your understanding meets their expectations.
• If you are both in agreement, draw up a contract and send it for signature. If you are not operating on the save wave length, hammer it out until you are.

Sometimes, all the preparation in the world will not help you when faced with a disgruntled customer. No matter how good your service is there will always be the odd client, or customer, who is difficult to deal with. By having guidelines in place to deal with these types of people, you and your staff will not be caught off guard should a problem arise.

While we all know that in many instances the customer is NOT always right, we have to keep in mind that we are in business to serve them. When developing your guidelines you should give some thought to what you might be willing to do to satisfy a difficult client.

In Part 3 we will discuss handling the angry client.
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