During a recent and unplanned trip to the local hospital emergency room, my wife was required to stay 24 hours for observation. She had gotten up during the night, blacked out and fell backward hitting her head on the marble topped night stand beside the bed. Nine hours later, a half-dozen test and seven stitches, a nurse took her to a hospital room for 24 hour observation.
It seems a lot of people fall. According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2008 analysis of 2005 statistics on falls, each year one of every three Americans 65 and older falls—and almost a third require medial treatment.
I thought it strange when a nurse came into my wife’s room and replaced her hospital-issued green “walking socks” with red ones. When I questioned the nurse why the change, she said, “the red socks alerts all the nurses on the floor that the wearer is prone to fall.” The red socks act as a warning sign and alert the nurses to be extra vigilant.
It would be nice if disenchanted customers, patrons or clients wore red walking socks to alert you that you had fallen out of step with them. It’s easy for a customer’s loyalty to slip on a late shipment, or stumble on a product mix up, or lose balance over what they perceive as a lack of attention resulting in a loss of sales and even switching to a competitor.
Often customers will not tell you what you are doing wrong, so sales fall prevention begins with you. Keep yourself in front of your customer—personal visit, phone call, email, fax or a simple note sent via US Mail—on a regular basis. Six actions you can take right now to reduce your risk of being a victim of falling sales:
1. Consistently review your sale reports and look for variances, especially those that aren’t easily explainable.
2. Look for evidence of inroads being made by your competition.
3. Ask your customer to evaluate your service, product and pricing. Just say, “How am I doing?” “Are we living up to your expectations?”
4. Ask, “What can I do to improve my serve?
5. Ask, “Is there something else I or my company can do to make your job easier?”
6. Ask, “What does your supervisor or boss think about me and my company?”
Whatever you do, you should consistently follow the first rule of customer service: enough is never enough.
Always be working to improve your service.
HOG THOUGHT:
Professionals are constantly doing two jobs at once: selling profitably today and positioning themselves to be successful tomorrow. If you plan on tomorrow being more profitable than today, you must make a habit of looking for red warning signs and take corrective action.
HOG QUOTE:
“I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment, and kept me flying respectful of my machine and always alert in the cockpit.” — Chuck Yeager
HOG ACTION:
Be alert to recognize customer or client dissatisfaction, discontent, or frustration. At the first sign of red walking socks, determine the problem, assure your customer or client that you are on it and then get the issue(s) resolved in a timely manner. The quicker a problem is recognized, the faster it is solved. Great opportunities often are disguises as problems. Recognizing and solving problems is a key to relationship building.
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