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"You don't want happy customers ... You want loyal customers."
Service your customers
Service is the part of your organization that helps your customers utilize products effectively. This means training, support, customizations, and implementation. Service should be a critical part of your business proposition because customers don't just buy a product. What they buy is a "whole product," a purchase that includes services.
Develop customer satisfaction
Since customers need fast, accurate, and relevant solutions to their needs, the organization must continuously improve the response to customer solution requirements. Service has to move progressively closer to the customer and drive factors of product improvement.
Share the knowledge
Knowledge created and used by the support organization needs to be used to drive support strategies: sharing information, providing customer self-help, leveraging resources, performing value-added services, and directing future products.
Support the current infrastructure
You have to build your response mechanism and support structure around your customer's business model. Take your current systems and re-focus them toward effective knowledge capture and delivery that makes the most sense to your marketplace. It only stands to reason that the better you service your customer, the more satisfied the customer. Thus, repeat business is fostered.
Assurance
The organization must strive, however, for a loyal customer, not merely a satisfied customer. A satisfied customer is happy, but a loyal customer buys again. This is accomplished by exceeding the customer's expectation, a practice that should be at the very core of how you run your business. It can be as simple as guaranteeing the shipping of the product in 5 days or providing a 2-day delivery option.
Feedback
The feedback mechanism must be installed in every part of the organization, from a follow-up phone call from the salesperson to see how things are going to a thank-you letter from the product manager to a personal thank-you gift from the president for exceptional orders. You need to establish period surveys, evaluate the purchasers' usage of the products, and their satisfaction.
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