Senior Florists spend a lot of time to build a customer base and maintain customer care. They have to find the customers, know them, understand them, analyse them, and offer them the best of company’s products and services. Senior florists should also have excellent skills in handling difficult situations.
What is customer care?
Customer care involves putting systems in place to maximise your customers' satisfaction with the business. There are a huge range of factors can contribute to customer satisfaction:
- how well the product or service matches customer needs;
- the value for money you offer;
- the efficiency and reliability in fulfilling orders;
- the professionalism, friendliness and expertise of the employees;
- how well the customers are kept informed; and
- the after-sales service.
1. Understand your customer
To manage customer care, first we have to find out how exactly the customers want. Information of their personal details, including work and home address, telephone, occupation, gender, age, birth days of each families member, colour and flower preferences, order history and shopping habits. Information can be gathered via face to face or telephone interview, survey and questionnaire.A well-designed database system is probably the best way of keep all the records, as it is flexible and allows different queries and alternations. Senior florists should completely understand the Data Protection Act and respect the customer’s privacy, they should also made all staff aware about this.
2. Measure your customer service levels
It is also important that the customer satisfaction level about service and products are measured, so that the company performance can be assessed. Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can be used to reflect how well the business runs:- the perception of the business;
- how often do the customer orders;
- the number of complaints about your products or services;
- the number of complaints about your staff; and
- the volume of marketing material sent out and responses generated.
3. Contact programmes
Do your best to make sure that your customers feel the extra contact is relevant and beneficial to them but not bombarding them with unwanted calls or marketing materials, as it will only be counter-productive.Customer contact programmes help to deliver tailored information to the customers such as special offers and reminder of coming events like Christmas and birthdays. This programme is particularly useful for reactivating relationships with lapsed customers. Newsletters and email bulletins are also useful for keeping customers informed.
While good overall service is the best way of generating customer loyalty, sometimes new relationships can be strengthened or old ones refreshed using customer loyalty schemes. Discounts, extra goods or prizes can be rewarded to loyal customers. Rewards can be given to repeat customers, cumulative spend, orders for large quantities or with a high value, prompt payment or length of relationship. A loyalty card can be introduced.
4. Dealing with complaints
Every business has to deal with situations in which things go wrong from a customer's point of view.Complaints should be handled courteously, sympathetically and above all swiftly. Make sure that your business has an established procedure for dealing with customer complaints and that it is known to all your employees. At the very least it should involve:
- listening sympathetically to establish the details of the complaint;
- recording the details together with relevant material, such as a sales receipt or damaged goods;
- offering rectification - whether by repair, replacement or refund; and
- appropriate follow-up actions, such as a letter of apology or a phone call to make sure that the problem has been made good.
