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Before getting involved with coaching entrepreneurs, I worked for 20 years in the children’s service industry. While working with small children was a joy, taught me a great deal about teaching, and also helped me learn how to listen to and meet the needs of others, the hardest part of the job didn’t have anything to do with the kids. No, those difficulties came in the form of their mothers.

The mothers of young children are the toughest customers I have ever come across. While these mothers may have been easy to please when they went shopping or dined out, pleasing and making them feel at ease in our children’s gym was a constant challenge. The reason for this was logical; in taking care of their children, we were taking care of the most absolute precious parts of their lives.

I learned pretty fast that if our business was going to succeed, we had to develop a sound strategy that focused on quality, positive “customer experience”. I also realized that we needed to train employees on how to effectively please our difficult customer base to make this strategy a core part of everything we did.

In developing this important part of our business strategic solutions, we eventually discovered that there certain factors that gave us a competitive advantage. Four of these were:

<strong>1. </strong><strong>First impressions mean everything!- </strong>This has often been said and it’s absolutely true. Since<strong> </strong>research has shown that customers decide whether or not to buy from a business based on the first experience they had, you better make an amazing first impression. To accomplish this, we made a point of treating new customers like long lost family and always tried to promote a happy vibe at our child care center. Many of our customers told us how much they appreciated these efforts.<strong> </strong>

<strong>2. </strong><strong>Make every customer feel like they were the only customers.-</strong> We took the time to really learn to know our customers by asking employees to give us a note about some unique, positive aspect of each family. This ensured that employees would take the time to converse with customers and get to know them on a more personal basis.<strong> </strong>That way, the staff knew more about the lives of our customers and when they demonstrated this, customers felt important, noticed, and appreciated. <strong></strong>

<strong>3. </strong><strong>Keep the customer engaged- </strong>To show that we always kept our customers in mind,<strong> </strong>our staff would call parents every few months and tell them what a pleasure it was to work with their children. They would also update them on how their children were doing in our educational programs.<strong></strong>

<strong>4. </strong><strong>Give them something extra- </strong>This is all about going above and beyond for the customer. In addition to providing them with high quality service, we made efforts to keep them updated on consumer reports related to child care products, and regularly gave seminars on topics such as “redirecting behavior” and child health care issues. <strong></strong>

If we hadn’t incorporated a strong, customer service focus into our business, I am sure that we would have gone under in less than a year. Instead, the business grew because we developed and stuck to customer service strategies that worked. To learn more about how I succeeded in a challenging and competitive business sector, contact me now to learn about my small business training programs.