Spring Into Business Improvement with A Customer Referral Plan

It is thrilling to do some spring cleaning in your business and improve your customer referral policy. Spring cleaning is often thought of as the deep and thorough cleaning that takes place after the long winter has ended. While spring cleaning is usually thought of in connection with a home, spring cleaning should also be done in your business. Entrepreneurs should take time on a regular basis to evaluate the condition of the business, to find ways to improve the business and its operations. An important place to concentrate cleaning and improvement efforts is the area of customer referral.

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Every entrepreneur knows that customers make the business go around. After all no matter how wonderful the product or service, how well-trained the employees or how innovative the business model, no business can succeed without customers. An entrepreneur should always have in mind ways to satisfy customers and how to get more customers. Satisfied customers advertise your business with the stories they tell others about you and your business. It is critically important to your success that those stories be good ones. Therefore, the first step in creating a good and sustainable customer referral program is to satisfy your current customers.

Look at your business operations with a critical and objective eye. Ask the following questions about your customer service policy:

• do you have a written customer service policy that is understood and followed by all employees
• do customers know your hours, locations and refund policies
• how do you handle customer complaints
• what is your return policy
• what is your customer loyalty program

Once you are satisfying your current customers, the next step is to get your current customers to refer others to your business. There are several ways to do this:

• ask customers to write referral letters immediately after the satisfactory experience
• ask customers if they are willing to accept phone calls from potential customers
• have customers fill out customer experience cards to be shared with potential customers
• create a blog for your business where you share stories from and about satisfied customers
• create a customer forum section on your website that allows customers to talk about their experiences with your business and its products and services

There are several things to ask for when getting referral letters or stories to share from current customers. These things include:

• the name of a particularly good employee
• a problem that your product or service helped solve
• how a dissatisfied customer became a satisfied customer
• the customer's favorite thing about working with your business
• happy stories about results achieved from using your business' products or services

Photo Credit: Janeane Davis, Thrilling Thursday Spring Cleaning-Customer Service

An interesting fact is that there are as many ways to create a good customer referral plan as there are businesses. In order to be as successful as possible as an entrepreneur, it is important that you create a customer referral plan that works for your business. Also keep in mind that customer service is an ever-changing area of business operations. Things that satisfy customers today and make them refer customers to your business may no longer work tomorrow. Customer service is an area that needs continuous work and attention, do not rest on past successes.

In conclusion, it is thrilling to have a policy that gets your satisfied customers to refer more customers to your business. So, the question for you this thrilling day is , are your satisfied customers referring you more business?