I am going to talk about what I call Customer Service Diplomacy. Now don’t be alarmed. My intent is not to lecture you like some irritating school teacher about your job. The purpose of this is certainly not to bore you or aggravate you or insult your intelligence.

Actually the fact that you are reading this blog post is something of a compliment to your ability to always look for new ways of improvement. It represents an investment being made that is intended to be beneficial to you as well as to your company.

The main objectives of the next few posts:

1. To give you some ideas that may make your contact with your customers or clients more pleasant and enjoyable.
2. To give you some ideas that may make your job a little less stressful.
3. To give you some ideas that may give you an added edge in understanding other people and engineering cooperation from them.
4. To give you some ideas that may help you in advancing yourself

These small business marketing strategies focus on you and the customer. Where we believe the action is in business today. The experts and the research behind best selling business books as, “In Search of Excellence,” have reeducated American business about the value of recognizing the importance of the customer.

Quality is a frequently used business buzz word and much time and energy is devoted to talking about the quality of a company’s products, quality of services, quality control in the manufacturing plant but probably most important is the quality of customer relations.

To begin let’s look at the core of the problem then why the solutions are so important. In looking at all the available research data about customer and client behavior, we found that on the average a satisfied customer will tell about three other people about his satisfaction with a particular product, service, place of business or company.

That’s often called word-of-mouth advertising and is widely recognized as the most effective kind of advertising of all. Think about it …doesn’t a trusted friend’s recommendation or opinion about a place of business carry more weight in influence with you than all other types of advertising that business or its competitors may do. Obviously what a customer says about a business can have great affect on other people. From a positive standpoint it’s possible for this word-of-mouth advertising to make a big contribution to the growth of a business.

Consider this little math game. If one happy customer creates three more who each create three who each create three who each create three who each create three who each create three you’ve got 2,217 customers.

This story has a flip side though. The same research indicates that on the average a dissatisfied customer gripes to eleven other people. This shouldn’t be surprising. Bad news or negativity seems to spread faster and farther than good news. When you’re irritated, annoyed or disappointed with a business you probably tend to tell that story to a lot of people too.

This negative or critical word-of-mouth advertising is powerful also. It can stop people from doing business with a company who might otherwise have done so. If you want to think about this in shear numbers it only takes one dissatisfied customer to wipe out the positive affect in the marketplace of four satisfied customers.

All this only serves to reinforce the obvious…it’s very desirable for you to do everything possible to insure that its customers have satisfactory experiences whenever they call, come in or transact business.

Author Info:  Dan Kennedy is internationally recognized as the 'Millionaire Maker,' helping people in just about every category of business turn their ideas into fortunes. Dan's "No B.S." approach is refreshing amidst a world of small business marketing hype and enriches those who act on his advice.