The only way to stay in business is with clients, and Jack Mitchell, one of America's reading clothing retailers, knows how to attract and keep them.
He has a deceptively simple but winning relationship approach to customer service -- that a relationship is at the heart of every sale. Jack's business philosophy is based on "hugs" -- personal touches that satisfy, impress and exceed the expectations of customers. His book is entitled (obviously enough) Hug Your Customers, and it describes how to do that successfully.
For example, Mitchell suggests that businesses need to move from being reactive to becoming proactive, from focusing on transactions to emphasizing relationships, from providing perks to developing full-blown customer-driven service, and from a culture of meeting expectations to one of exceeding expectations. To accomplish these ends, a successful business must involve everyone in the process, keep a mindset devoted to the personal touch and, above all, care for people first. That means, then, a set of priorities based upon the following (and in this order): people, service, and product. It requires individual commitment to exceeding expectations no matter what, personal accountability whatever it takes, and personal ownership of situations and problems, no matter the difficulty (since problems are opportunities, after all).
It's a terrific little book and an engaging read, full of helpful stories and anecdotes from Mitchell's many years of experience. Significantly, he focuses a great deal of attention upon serving and empowering employees so they can better serve the customer base. Indeed, Mitchell's follow-up book is Hug Your People, which describes how to hire, inspire, and recognize employees to achieve remarkable results.
Yet whenever I read books like this one I am struck by just how little in them is really new. Most of us know what needs to be done in general and many of us do it a good bit of the time. It's really pretty simple, after all. But simple isn't always easy to accomplish, at least a lot of the time. The key problem tends to be making the commitment to do what needs to be done to be wildly successful all the time and the consistency to go out and make it happen and to keep it happening.
Read this book. Be inspired by the vision of what your business can become. Then make sure you stay the course and make it happen.