Entrepreneurs People Skills: 6 Needless Costly Mistakes #custexp
by Kate Nasser | 1 Comment »
Entrepreneurs People Skills: Do yours say you are open for business?
Entrepreneurs People Skills: 6 Needless Mistakes Image by: opensourceway via Flickr.
Entrepreneurs people skills make a tremendous difference in your customers’ experience with you. The smallest gaffes take big bites out of customer trust.
These mistakes create the question mark in the customer’s mind. They give customers a reason to look around for a better business to serve them. Don’t lose customers making mistakes you can easily avoid. Entrepreneurs people skills are worthy of your attention!
Entrepreneurs People Skills: 6 Needless Mistakes That Cost You Customers
These mistakes can make you seem unreliable and closed off to customers. If you do them often enough, they may actually close your business.
Entrepreneurs People Skills: Closed? Image via tonx via Flickr.
- You take time off without using an out-of-office email responder. Customers don’t know you’re on vacation. You don’t respond to them and they think you don’t care, aren’t service focused, or worse. An auto email responder is a corporate staple. Yet business owners often overlook this critical no cost step to retain customers.
- When a prospect that wants to speak on the phone, you guide them to your preferred medium like SKYPE. This is bad first impression. It tells customers that you expect them to adapt to your preferences. Ask customers how they would like to connect? Send the message that you want to serve them! Entrepreneurs people skills build tremendous trust in the early days.
- They want you to fix a problem and you give them instructions on how to fix it themselves. Although this sounds like a generous gift of your knowledge, it can seem like you don’t want to do the work. Simply ask the customer if they would like to try it themselves with your guidance. Some customers may prefer to pay you for your time than use their own time to struggle through. This may be especially true of your small business customers.
- You constantly check your smartphone when you are with them. Despite the prevalence of smartphones today, customers expect your attention. They judge your commitment to them based on your behavior. Make sure your behavior tells them they are important to you. If it’s a long meeting, check your smartphone at scheduled breaks — not during the meeting.
- When a customer needs your time, you tell them that your kitchen plumbing went bad and you’ll get back to them after it’s fixed. You might not believe business owners would say this. They actually do and it sends a bad message to customers. It says that your life is in disarray and that you put your challenges ahead of theirs. Just let the customer know when you are available to assist them. Leave your personal stress stories for coffee moments with friends.
- During your early meetings with customers, you talk endlessly about your integrity and your goals. Customers are often suspect of anyone who talks about their own integrity. True integrity speaks through actions not speeches. Simply focus all your attention on the customer. Listening is a tremendous trust builder!
Use great people skills to build bonds of success. Wow customers with your listening and attention. Give customers every care and consideration. Let them see how your flexibility makes life easy for them.
Secure customers’ trust with your accountability. Let them know they can always rely on you! Show them there is no better business for them, than yours.
From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People Skills Coach™
Tap more of Kate’s people skills business acumen through her social media streams Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter. She welcomes your interaction.
Grateful for closed business image by tonx via Flickr Creative Commons License.
©2014 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. I appreciate your sharing the link to this post on your social streams. However, if you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please email info@katenasser.com for permission and guidelines. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.
Kate Nasser, The People Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on leading change, employee engagement, teamwork, and delivering the ultimate customer service. She turns interaction obstacles into interpersonal success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.