The place where you need to start in providing Make-You-Happy Customer Service isn’t very exciting or fancy, but it is critical. Your core values, your vision, your mission statement, whatever it is that is at the heart of your company needs to put a huge emphasis on the customer. If it doesn’t, it’s going to be apparent in what you do on a daily basis and your team members are simply not going to believe you when you tell them that customer service is important and it’s going to be reflected in the service they give your customers.

Now don’t get me wrong, I like making money. In fact the best reason to implement these 55 secrets is to maximize your income. But if your core value is only making the most amount of money in the least amount of time, you might as well stop reading!

I don’t read our company value statement or beliefs daily, but they are the foundation of what we do at American Retail Supply. Our Values are very simple,

•Take care of our team members

•Take care of our Customers

•Be an honorable member of the community

You might be surprised to see that “Take Care of Our Team Members" is listed before “Take Care of Our Customers". Please understand that these values aren’t numbered, they are bulleted, which means none is more important than another. And while one value isn’t more important than another they are in the order they are for a reason.

We believe that if we take care of team members they will automatically take care of customers better. It is as simple as what goes around comes around. Team members who believe that the company has their best interests at heart will do a better job taking care of customers.

Now again don’t get me wrong, I make it perfectly clear to each new team member that when we say Take Care of Team Members, we don’t mean welfare. We mean providing team members with a means of helping them achieve their work and personal goals.

So how do these types of core values affect the bottom line?

Ken Blanchard, the author of The One Minute Manager, wrote an article in Executive Excellence where he reported on a study done by the Ethics Resource Center. The Center did a composite of the Dow Jones for 30 years. They discovered that had you invested $30,000 in the Dow for 30 years you would have $134,000 at the time of the study. Then they studied the 21 companies on the Dow Jones that have set high ethical standards with a written published company statement stated that their purpose, their function, was to serve the public with high ethical standards. Had you invested your $30,000 with those 21 companies with high ethical standards you would have well over $1,000,000. Let me ask you, which do you want, $134,000 or $1,000,000?

So the first secret to Make-You-Happy customer service is that your core values need to put a huge amount of value on customer service.