We all hear anecdotal stories of horrible customer service. Sadly, many people have come to expect bad customer service as the norm today.

If you are starting a business in today’s hyper competitive marketplace, you should realize this acceptance of poor customer service as a real sales opportunity.

If people’s service expectations are low and you can provide excellent customer service, you can expect your business to grow. The real question becomes are you willing to do what it takes to provide this level of customer service?

Starting a new business is frustrating and hard. The emotional roller coaster ride can be brutal. Committing your organization to achieving outstanding customer service is easy when you are starting out. The hard part comes when things are not necessarily going your way and you begin to encounter many of the frustrations new entrepreneurs often face.

When you are tired, frustrated and wondering if your new venture will ever succeed is the most important time to deliver above and beyond what your customers are expecting. Often times, many entrepreneurs call this “going the extra mile.”

Recently, one of our customers purchased a membership from our dating website for golfers. During the registration process, he had selected the buy now button twice and his credit card was mistakenly double billed. He called the contact number on our website and was pleased to speak with a real person regarding his concern. Within 15 minutes, we had issued a refund and personally called him to let know what we had done.

Needless to say, many consumers are still somewhat leery of purchasing something online. This personal follow up with customers can help your company get to that extra mile. Keep doing this and your business will grow.

Our customer was very pleased with our quick follow up. He expressed his gratitude by saying he would have no reservations in recommending our site to his golfing friends. Instead of saying what a brutal job we had done, our customer was telling others about his positive experience on our site. As well all know personal word of mouth advertising is the absolute best kind.

Helping one customer at a time will help you get to that extra mile. As you will soon find out, the organizations that go that extra mile for their customers will see this reflected in the bottom line.

The “extra mile” is often the road less traveled because you have to cover hundreds if not thousands of miles just to get to that point. Once you get there, you will be very pleased to realize how little traffic there is.

Gary Kelly is co-creator of the online dating website for golfers, http://www.DateAGolfer.com and http://www.PuttingForPar.com, a golf website specializing in personalized ball markers

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