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Everyone is talking about the rising cost of health care. Not me. I’m talking about the health and well-being of your customers.

How healthy is their relationship with you?

What’s your cost to keep them healthy?

Let me give you a clue about the cost of keeping customers healthy. It pales in comparison to the cost of losing them.

If your customers are angry, think of them as having business illness. Once it’s discovered, you will go to all lengths and spend thousands of fruitless dollars to try to save the patient. But if the illness is discovered too late, the patient is likely to die.

You could have spent far less money and prevented this illness from occurring. Instead of waiting until your customer is terminally ill, why not institute a customer wellness program to prevent illness from occurring in the first place?

HERE’S A WAKE-UP CALL: Prevention is the best way, the easiest way and the least expensive way. It’s also the competition prevention way.

Here is Jeffrey Gitomer’s Customer Wellness Program – a success formula for serving memorably and keeping customers loyal. (NOTE: It will require that ALL members of your team buy it, buy in, get in the customer awareness groove and get service healthy.)

1. Establish benchmarks. Minimum acceptable standards, methods of response, decision parameters, a list of every reason customers call, a list of every customer complaint, a list of every customer expectation and a documented “best response” to each of those situations.

2. Empower employees with specific actions to make decisions based on your benchmarks. Empower everyone to say yes. Empower only senior management to say no.

3. Start with “YES!” Everyone needs to start with attitude training FIRST. Get there by whatever positive means it takes.

4. Train everyone in your business. Starting with a YES! attitude and developing fundamental skills in achieving goals, understanding yourself and your co-workers, developing pride, accepting responsibility, listening to understand, communicating effectively, embracing change, making decisions, giving memorable service and working as a team.

5. Develop a standardized “gripe response” formula. Train everyone in your organization to execute it perfectly.

6. Ask your customers to help you serve them better by asking “where does it hurt?” Listen to discover their most important characteristics in a relationship with you. Ask them where you can improve. Ask them to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses in those areas of prime importance to them. Find out their perceptions and match them to yours. Modify your characteristics and perceptions to meet theirs.

7. Evaluate your own strengths and weaknesses. Make a plan for weakness improvement that has a deadline and requires measurable results.

8. Identify your competitive advantages. Play to those as often as possible. To identify them, ask customers.

9. Stay in front of your customer. More than your competition. Develop tools that aid that process (newsletters, faxes, articles, gifts, tickets).

10. Train everyone to serve exceptionally and memorably every time a customer is encountered.

11. Surprise your customers as often as you can. Exceed their expectations in a memorable way. Get people talking about you.

12. Decide you are willing to go the extra mile. Sometimes extra effort is required to make service happen. You have to have a willingness to go the extra mile to achieve it.

12.5. Your report card is unsolicited referrals. Unsolicited referrals are the measure of your success, the testament of your quality and your ability to serve.

Jeffrey Gitomer can be reached by phone at (704) 333-1112 or by e-mail at salesman@gitomer.com. © 2008 Jeffrey H. Gitomer