It would be a real good idea to conduct a self-audit to see how you stack up in providing customer service for your members and prospects. You can actually keep a running total if you will remember to keep it up. Then your audit would only consist of calculating your results.

You could list every time a customer has to remind you that you haven’t done something you promised; when you are late with fulfilling an obligation; when you don’t show up for a conference and any other time you have told the customer you would. You can see that the customer shouldn’t have to remind you that you are not really engaged.

You could actually have ‘target goals’ where you try to have less instances where the customer is impacted by something you didn’t remember or bother to do that they are expecting. This happens even where someone has paid for something and it is not received until they have to remind the business owner that he/she owes them. Pretty scandalous.

Of course this can be an opportunity to actually make points with the customer if the problem is handled in the right way. (The right way being fast, complete and not again). Of course this doesn’t work after a while if you keep repeating the same bad behavior. So the idea is to keep track of everything so that you can try to focus some extra effort to provide decent customer service to your members and customers.

The other area that people sometimes don’t seem to think reflect on their credibility is software that month after month doesn’t perform correctly. At first there are excuses and promises to fix it but then it just can become a given – the software doesn’t work, live with it (or not). While the member may not leave due to this, it has to cause them to wonder why you would allow the inconvenience and surely must begin to feel like they don’t really matter to you.