I received an email notice today telling me one of our clients gave us a 5-star rating on Google and it has me thinking about great customer service and why it’s important.
Thoughts of customer service always bring me back to two things. The first being one of the first things you learn about business, which is, that it is more expensive to acquire a new client than it is to keep your existing ones. The second is what I have tried to instill in my kids, which is the idea of do unto others as you wish they would do unto you.
Customer service is always a top priority for us at Tetra Capital, and one of the things we think truly sets us apart from other freight bill factoring companies. Here are a few things we think it takes to have great customer service and why it is important to the trucking industry:
Personal Attention
Everyone wants to feel important and not be treated as a number, which is why we know all our clients on a first-name basis, not as an account number.
It is also important to listen and be responsive to your clients, so they know they are important. To help with this, I find it helpful to hold myself to a rule of responding to clients in less than 24 hours, although most of the time I can respond immediately. When you give your clients personal attention, you can help to ensure they are satisfied with you and your business and will continue to ask you to haul loads for them.
Transparency
No one likes to be nickel and dimed or feel like they are in the dark on things. Which is why it is important to be upfront and honest about everything. Your client will ultimately always figure out if there is something you were not transparent about and it can only lead to ill or hard feelings which can cause them to look for another trucking company to haul their next load. Read our post on why transparency is important to us.
Reliability
Do what you say you are going to do when you say you will do it. Your clients want to know you can be trusted to deliver the loads when you say you will. This can lead to them asking you to haul more loads and referring you to others. In other words, under promise and over deliver.
Great Customer Service Is The Key To Success
For trucking owner-operators and small fleet owners, great customer service can be the difference between your business growing and its failure. When you deliver not only the load, but great customer service, you will have happy brokers and shippers who want to continue to do business with you and refer you to others.
