10 things that can harm your relationships with customers

I’ll Be Back: How to Get Customers to Come Back Again & Again is out now! In the latest book from Shep Hyken, he discusses 10 loyalty killers that can terminate your relationship with your customers. On today’s show, we’re pleased to welcome back customer service and experience expert, New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author, Shep Hyken to discuss his book and what you can do to ensure your customers come back.

Hyken refers to the ‘killers’ as terminators in the book. He also referenced them as loyalty killers. The first terminator is apathy. 70% of customers that leave a business to go elsewhere are due to apathy, or an employee didn’t seem to care about the customer. The second terminator is rudeness. The next two are no response and poor response time. Some companies take four to six days, to respond to a customer inquiry. Often times the problem has been festering for quite a while, and no customer wants to wait.

The next terminator is, you made them wait too long. Hyken says some of the best companies have figured out what to do. Give customers options. He also says, before consumers do business with you, they already have doubts based on your response. Another terminator is, you make the customer repeat the same story, over again. Hyken says you should always do a second follow-up.

He says when a customer has a bad experience, invite them back and offer an incentive. When you have issues or problems, Hyken says you first need to acknowledge and apologize. Then after discussing the resolution, fix it, own it, and act with urgency.

To get your copy of “I’ll Be Back”, visit IllBeBackBook.com or find it on Amazon.

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