Impress your customers
There are many little ways you can impress customers and keep them loyal as your company grows and changes. You can mail coupons or throw in some loyalty discounts for long-standing customers. You can take the time to get to know their names and learn enough about them to strike up a conversation when you see them.
All of those tactics help. But there is only one true way you can build loyalty with customers: fulfill your promises. Do what your mission statement says you do.
At Aqua America, DeBenedictis has made reliable water service the No. 1 priority. With a water utility provider, there isn’t much else to guarantee besides faucets that run and toilets that flush. But when the faucets don’t run and the toilets don’t flush, customer attitudes and confidence can wither in a hurry.
“The No. 1 issue is we get in there and start fixing their system right away,” DeBenedictis says. “The key is that customers see the difference you make early on. For us, it might be a new water plant, fixing leaks, improved water pressure. If we do those things, we get good customer feedback because we got right in there and fixed those systems right away.”
If you want your employees to place an emphasis on customer service, you need employees who realize that they’re not working just to make the delivery or produce the product or balance the budget. They’re working, in their own way, to satisfy your customers and keep them coming back.
Once again, it comes back to culture and what you emphasize as a leadership team.
“If you give people a place where they want to work for life, they’re going to come to you with the mentality of being a professional,” DeBenedictis says. “Then, they’ll say that their job isn’t just to make the repair, it isn’t just to put the pipe in the ground correctly, it’s to make sure the customer understands what is going on and why, and that they’re happy with the job we are doing.
“We get a lot of letters from customers when our employees go above and beyond the job they were asked to do — such as, they went to someone’s house on a service call and found another leak somewhere else and fixed that. If you broadcast those examples, people start to know that their job is to make the customers happy. That is something that really has to be a part of the culture from the start.”
Once again, you need to turn to your long-term employees to set the pace for customer service. When your long-standing employees hold others accountable for maintaining the reputation of the company, it’s a positive form of peer pressure.
“If you’re in a company that doesn’t have a lot of turnover, the peer pressure gets to be important,” DeBenedictis says. “The reputation of someone who has been at the company for 25 years is at stake, and then you’re bringing in a new person who might not be doing things up to their standards. That’s when employees can affect this. It’s peer pressure as much as it’s discipline or anything else.”
If you don’t have a customer-focused culture or if you can’t adequately project it to your customers, your company’s reputation will start to suffer. It’s an ongoing battle, and you need as many allies as you can find.
In the end, you are the company your customers think you are and you are the type of leader that your employees think you are.
“Most people don’t know where the water plant is in their town,” DeBenedictis says. “They just know that water comes out of the faucet and goes down the drain. They don’t know where it comes from or where it goes. But they see the trucks out on the street, they see us digging up and replacing old pipe, so they see that we’re making that investment in them and that we’re trying to build a long-term relationship with them and their towns.”
HOW TO REACH: Aqua America Inc., (877) 987-2782 or www.aquaamerica.com