SalesVu helps you improve your customer service by making credit card processing really, really easy. Check us out.

As more and more business transactions get both conducted and rated on an increasingly social web, customer service is now more important than ever. In days of yore, a customer’s dissatisfaction usually found an audience of her friends and family. Now, no joke, THOUSANDS of people can hear about a negative experience, and not just hear about, but tweet it, like it, share it, email it—with the click of a button.

TechCrunch recently highlighted startling insights from the Customer Experience Impact 2010 report from RightNow. The most important takeaway: 82% of consumers in the U.S. said they’ve stopped doing business with a company because of a poor customer service experience.

And that’s a real shame, not just in a “let’s be nice to each other” kind of way (though we should of course). It’s a shame because poor customer service has a direct and significant impact on the bottom line, especially when considering customer lifetime value and the power of word-of-mouth marketing.

So what can you do to ensure you don’t suffer the same effects as this or this?

Make amazing customer service a priority of your business. Here’s how.

Be a Customer at Your Own Business (or a Competitor’s)

When was the last time you walked through your business, either for real in the physical world, or as a rehearsal in your mind, from the point of view of your customer? From being unaware of you, to aware, to walking in, to shopping, to buying, to leaving?

This exercise is important because as the business owner, you are so wrapped up in your own concerns, it’s easy to take for granted the experience of your customer on an individual level. The moment you do that, or, if you’re reading this and you realize you’ve never consciously considered that process, you’re in trouble. There are critical blindspots that need attention.

If you own a restaurant, go out to eat at a competitor and take notes. Where do you as a customer feel like your needs are left unmet? Where are your needs not just met, but you are delighted?

If you own a dog walking business, think through and write down the steps someone goes through as they meet you and hire you. How does it start? Where are you? Where are they? What happens?

If you have a salon, book yourself a haircut. Walk in. Where do you sit? Would you like a coffee, tea? Reading material? One salon I went to in Miami provided little netbooks for browsing the web. Later, when I moved out of the city, I deliberately delayed getting a haircut for one month so I could visit that salon when I was back in town.

You want to go through and experience your business as just a regular customer off the street, so you can see where you can blow her mind and delight her.

Articulate what the customer experience is, start to finish, step-by-step.

Here’s an example:

Get Inside Your Customers’ Minds

Once you’ve worn their shoes, it’s time to get inside their minds. Take out a piece of paper or open up a word document and answer the following questions:

• Who is your ideal target customer?
• What is the main benefit that he wants when he chooses your business?
• What’s important to him?
• What is he afraid of (in the context of your business)?
• What is he frustrated by?
• What does he really, actually want?

For example, the main benefit of a salon.

You own a salon. What do you sell?

It’s not haircuts. It’s confidence. Looking great. Standing out.

What are some frustrations your ideal target customer might have?

“I’m tired of stylists who don’t listen to me or understand what I’m trying to say.”

“My hair color constantly fades, or I’m never happy with the way it looks.”

“I can’t recreate the look at home.”

And so forth. Knowing these frustrations, what can you do to immediately stand out from your competition? Provide the solution to these frustrations.

Once you know what your ideal target customer truly wants, you can overdeliver on what he or she wants and win loyal customers for life.

(Finding out what she wants is as simple as asking. Keep your eye out for a post in the future that digs deep into how to do this in a way that makes both you the business owner happy and doesn’t weird out the customer or seem strange.)

So what does your ideal target customer really want when she enters your store or otherwise does business with you?

Identify The Values Your Business Demonstrates

We all have that friend who is consistently late. Or only calls when he needs something. Or nine times out of ten cancels at the last minute. Or doesn’t really listen to you and just talks about himself.

You eventually phase those kinds of people out of your life. And that’s because that person’s behavior demonstrates values that you don’t find appealing. If someone is consistently late, she is saying, “I don’t respect your time,” and one of her values (unconsciously or consciously) is “My time is more important than others’ time.”

Your business is the same way. Each interaction you have with a customer expresses the values of your business.

The key is to 1). know what those values are and 2). translate those values into concrete actions that express those values.

This story about the Ritz Carlton has been passed around quite a bit, because it perfectly captures this idea. It’s interesting because the Ritz is very value-driven. And it finds ways to express those values in concrete actions.

Tony Hsieh is famous because of this .

What values drive your business?

How can you express those values in a concrete way?

Pick What’s Most Important

There are countless little tips online, lists of 50, of 75, of 101 little tips. These range from the obvious — “Smile!” — to the less obvious — “Make sure signing the receipt is NOT the last exchange a customer has with you before leaving your shop.” But all of those tips are meaningless if they aren’t coming from a framework that you truly understand. Or if you just put lipstick on a pig and try the tips out without knowing what your customer actually experiences, what they want, and what values you’re demonstrating as a business.

You are busy. You have financial goals you want to hit. Time and money is precious. So you need to save time and make small, powerful changes.

The next step is to identify just 3 key areas to improve. Why three?

We say three because there are a million things that you could do — and as a result, you do nothing. By focusing on three, you keep it psychologically very do-able.

So what are your three? Perhaps it’s the way you greet your customers. Perhaps its listening. Maybe it’s figuring out a way to turn a mundane step in the process (waiting for your appointment) into a delight (providing a complimentary cup of tea).

Whatever you think, limit yourself to three areas. What are they?

Turn This Advice into Actionable Steps You Can Test Today

Now that you’ve got your three areas, you just need to convert them into concrete behaviors or policies you can implement.

For example, if you want to improve the way you listen to your customers, then that can translate to making sure you maintain eye contact with them, possibly even noting their eye color.

If you want to make your store more welcoming, then set a policy of warmly greeting new customers and welcoming back returning customers.

If you’d like to be a business known for its appreciation of its customers, set up a simple system of including a little token of gratitude in the customer’s shopping bag, perhaps a note, or a chocolate.

By articulating these changes specifically, you ensure you’ll actually stick to it. And then you’ll be on the path to truly delighting your customers.

What 3 concrete changes can you test today?

These are just some considerations and ways to rock customer service. What other suggestions do you have for delighting your customers?

SalesVu helps you improve your customer service by making credit card processing really, really easy. Check us out.

Hello, welcome to the SalesVu Point of Sale and Mobile Payment Management Portal. Today I will show you how to create a new product and how to sync it to all your mobile devices. After you click on the “Products and Services” icon from the homepage, click the Add button here. Enter a name for the product, you can choose to add a description, you can select a category for the new product. You may type it in manually or you may select from a list of those you’ve already created. Then input the selling price. Next, you select the tax bracket the product falls under. You can either select from existing tax brackets or add new ones. You can choose to have SalesVu automatically update your inventory whenever this product is sold by checking this box. This will take you back to the categories and products screen, which will now display your newly created product. All changes from the SalesVu.com management portal will automatically sync with your mobile devices every five minutes. You can also touch the “Sync with SalesVu.com” button to force the update. Now let’s sell the product. When you create a new order, SalesVu will allow you to navigate your products and services by category or alphabetically. So now let’s add the product we just created to our new order where we can increase the quantity or delete the product. SalesVu allows us to track cash, credit card, check, and gift card transactions. Credit card transactions can be swiped or entered manually. For transactions without predefined products, SalesVu allows you to customize the transaction amount. Let’s close this order using a cash transaction either with exact amount of making change. Once the order is closed, we can easily email a receipt to the customer. Now that we have completed the order, let’s go back to the online portal where we can remotely monitor our sales in real time. Let’s go to the Orders tab to view the sale we just made. We can view orders from a specific time and date range, or use the quick pick tab to select a predefined time period. This screen allows us to either view the summary of the order or expand it to see the details. Now let’s go to the Reports tab where we can either create new reports or view predefined reports. One of the predefined reports is a line chart of our aggregated sales across all devices for the last 30 days. Another predefined report shows all the products sold today, with their quantity and sales amount. We can also see a bar graph of sales by categories, a table of all closed orders, or a pie chart showing our product mix. Thank you for viewing this instructional video, please check regularly for more SalesVu tutorials.

Hi, I’m Austin Barbisch, I’ve been a trainer here in Austin since 1996. One of the big problems with this business is it’s basically cash and check. That’s all I’ve been able to do. I haven’t been able to take any credit cards. So I decided for me to kind of update my business and open up my options for payments, so I decided to and I got online and I started looking at the apps for the iphone and found SalesVu’s iPhone and iPad POS app. I checked Square and some of the other options and I just ended up going with SalesVu because the rates were lower. I’ve got two different businesses, I’m also a massage therapist. I’m actually able to split up my business and show two different ways to split up my payment. So for tax reasons when I need to go in later on a find out where did my money come in, I’m able to tell where my money, what I made. I love the credit card swipe option. It’s awesome. I’m able to take payment right off the clients credit card. Give it t me, swipe and it’s done. Goes right in. It automatically emails them a receipt so they have receipts for their tax transactions. Another thing I really like about the software is that this actually tracks when I give a discount. I’ve been doing paper coupons, and advertisements in the paper. Sometimes you know a coupon works, sometimes it doesn’t. This way I know. This is absolute verification if my marketing tactics are working to make my business grow. It’s real easy to check on here. I can get on SalesVu. Right here, here’s the icon on the phone. I can go over to my businesses, All my clients are on this phone by the way. If I want to start an order, start an order right here. Go right here. Complete log of all the people I have, all my clients. It’s very secure. It’s in a cloud. I put this information on my phone, it goes up to the cloud, I can get to it at any time. I can get to this information on my laptop and my iphone. Completely syncing. You make a change in one end and it syncs to the other. I love that, it’s awesome. I was really impressed by the client tracking. You’re actually able to tell, what client actually bought, how many sessions they bought, if they used a coupon, if I used a discount rate. You’re able to put a discount rate into this phone. It’s bullet proof.

Watch Why Brian’s Brew Chose SalesVu

Hey this is Brian from Brian’s Brew. I recently switched from another system to SalesVu’s iPhone and iPad POS. SalesVu is the best point of sale and mobile payment solution I’ve ever seen. SalesVu’s card reader is more stable and more secure than other systems. Their rates are better. With other systems, if I enter the card manually, because of an account that I have on file or a scratched card, they want to charge 3.5%. With SalesVu, it’s still 2.7% for manually entered cards. With other systems, if I do more than a $1000 I have to wait 30 days for the funds to post. With SalesVu, it doesn’t matter how much I do, it’s still the next day.
I love this SalesVu app because it just blows other systems out of the water. It is the best point of sale. Other systems are very basic. You put items on there, once you get over 20 items you have trouble finding everything, but with this SalesVu app, you can look at it through category, you can look at it alphabetically, you can program the list where, the top of list is what you’re selling the most. You can find anything in seconds. It’s very user friendly. I love how I can just program modifiers in, if someone wants to make a latte a soy latte I can have that charge as a modifier. You can’t do that with other systems. There’s a great part of the app that connects with facebook. It’s fantastic for viral marketing. There’s a discount button on the app that’s not on other systems. You can program it to be what ever kind of discount you want. That’s not anything close to what other systems offer. The great thing about SalesVu is that, it is the whole package. It is a wonderful point of sale. It’s mobile, and you can do sales out in the field. When I’m on a catering order. I took a sale in an elevator on the way up to a place where I was delivering coffee.
One of my favorite things about the SalesVu app is the ability to get on the cloud and control everything. You can change your prices, add a product, all in a matter of seconds. You can hit save, pushes everything to your device, no matter what you do, if you’re changing something on the cloud, it’ll push it to all your devices. So I have three different devices that I use at the current shop. You can track sales by device and not just general lump sum. So when I’m running reports, I can track what’s selling fastest and what’s selling slow. It’s great you that you can run it by not just how many tacos you’re running, but what kind of tacos and what time of day, hourly, what time of day are you selling out of tacos. SalesVu helps me track all that. Other systems doesn’t allow me to track any of that. Just great that you can get something so simple to use and so vast in its abilities. In real time I can know what my sales are at the shop. When I went of vacation to Arkansas, I was able to get online to see how the employees were doing, and see what the sales were. I was able to tack our hourly, any kind of report you could think of, you can run hourly, you can run by product, you can put it in a bar graph, you can put it in a line, a pie chart, a table form. It’s so easy to use and so easy to track. The cloud offers so many features. You can manage your customers, view the customer history. When I grow my business and add many more devices and more locations, I can have a good picture of who needs to be up selling an extra shot to a latte, or adding more food items to the general drink and so it’s real important for me to know who’s on what device and who’s our best salesman, and what techniques are they using so that we can get other employees to use the same thing.
So one day in the future, I can be sitting by my pool, and have my laptop out, and just see what the sales are, what’s going on in every shop in all 30 stores.