Customer Handling Leading to A Startup Company Shut Down

Have you tried to handle customers who kept on contacting you before, during and after sersvice? These customers can lead to company closure if they are not handled properly. I was referring to Donald Trump’s blog in talking about complaints.

My Past Experience
I remember my first official startup company closed down in just half a year in 2004. We were doing a web design business (I’m not the one doing the backend, I was concentrating on sales.) as we found out that there was a huge demand for people who want to set up their websites for the business or personal. As we started taking up our first project, we were incapable of catering to the demanding nature of our customers. We concentrated too much time working on one customer to make sure she is satisfied with our work and in the end, somehow I realize it can never be a full satisfaction… She can tell you “Hey I want to tweak this portion.” And when it’s done, she will say “No, I think that’s not nice, let’s try another way.” And it can go on and on and on…

It is not about customer satisfaction
At first, I thought web design business is not the right business to do. Now, I must admit that I was wrong to say that. As I move on to do different business, I start to see similar patterns. And it is not really about 100% customer satisfaction even though it is often used as a marketing gimmick. It is about how we handle our customers that is going to determine the business success.

Focus on giving results, instead of satisfaction
Sometimes, you have to lead your customers correctly to give them the results (and not satisfaction!). This is where the sales techniques might come in to help you to close deals effectively. Try asking a programmer to talk to his client about his own program… This programmer will be concentrating more towards fulfilling the customer’s satisfaction and focusing himself more towards tweaking his own program more than convincing why this product is made this way for maximum results…

Giving up on customers
Sometimes, it is just the customer’s problem. Like Donald Trump said in his post, we might have to give up these kind of customers who keep on complaining. They are simply taking up our time… It’s going to be a lose-lose situation if we were to handle our customers this way. Because if we concentrate too much time with that customer, we are losing our cashflow to maintain as a company to continue servicing that customer… In the end, this customer has just killed a business by accident!

Conclusion
Don’t be too focused on giving the customer full satisfaction… Definitely the customer has to be satisfied with your products and services to a certain extend or else they would not have considered your business… Control your customer in one of the ways below:

1. Educate your customers through marketing campaigns.
2. Monitoring your customers’ after-sale behavior if they started to use it more than once.
3. Let your customers know what you can do, and cannot do… It always works in big companies! I believe it is applicable even though we might not dare to do it because of cashflow problem (We might not dare to offend these customers sometimes because we are still starting up.)
4. Learn more sales skills from Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins…