How do you feel when you pick up a burger and fries at McDonald’s and, upon arriving home, discover they didn’t leave the onions off as requested? Or when you are searching for an item at a store and no one asks if you need any help?
Customer service is essential to any enterprise, including a horse business. Without it, you might lose the one asset that keeps your business running year after year. Without customers, no money comes in, and your business goes belly-up.
Stands to reason that you would focus on customer service in your horse business. Oddly enough, this is one area where equine industry pros often fail.
You Have Two Jobs
The first is to keep your customers safe. The second is to keep them happy.
Sometimes the two jobs are mutually exclusive. For example, you might have to implement a safety rule at the barn that inconveniences certain customers. While this side effect is regrettable, it is also unavoidable.
However, horse business owners can increase their client retention by striving to reconcile these two jobs as efficiently and effectively as possible. If you can accomplish both without sacrificing your integrity or your livelihood, you’ll be miles ahead of the competition.
It is also important to realize that one cannot exist without the other. An unsafe customer is also unhappy, and an unhappy customer can present a safety risk to himself and those around him. This alone should be sufficient motivation to work on customer service in your horse business.
Focus on Transparency
Most of the customer service issues in our society result from lack of transparency. If customers don’t understand why a business owner makes a particular decision, they are far more likely to protest vehemently.
For example, I recently worked with a horse business owner who teaches riding lessons and boards horses. She had to increase the rates for both riding lessons and boarding, and her customers flew off the handle. They, after all, were as pinched by the economic meltdown as anyone else.
What I helped her realize was that she had not taken the time to discuss these rate changes with her customers. She hadn’t explained to them the reasons behind the increases, and they therefore had no way of understanding her position.
Once she told them about the rising cost of hay, the swell of grain prices and the other amplified expenses she was experiencing, most of her customers backed off. They realized that she wasn’t increasing her prices out of greed, but out of necessity.
Two Caveats
Transparency is a great way to improve customer service in the horse business, but there are certain risks. If you aren’t careful, you can do more harm than good.
First, transparency doesn’t mean you have to share every detail of your horse business with your customers. You don’t need to open up your accounting records for public scrutiny, nor should you share proprietary information about your business model.
Second, transparency is a Band-Aid. Just as a strip of padded adhesive will not cure an infection, transparency in the horse business will not resolve all underlying problems. Horse business owners often think that they can resolve issues with one simple solution, but this is rarely the case.
Just because you open up about the reasons behind a change does not mean that all of your customers will fall happily in line. Some might leave, others might continue to raise a fuss, and still more will quietly stew in their rage.
Nothing you can do about that. Seriously.
Learn to Listen
The best customer service solution in the horse business is the listening skill. If you can take the time to hear out your customers’ complaints, you will find yourself leaps and bounds ahead of the problem. Fail to listen, and you will probably fail in the horse business.
Customer service is about hearing your customers out and attempting to give them what they need. It’s about taking into account the feelings of others and doing your best to provide the best possible service. It’s about building relationships with your clients.
If you don’t have the time for customer service, you don’t belong in the horse business. Find some other way to make money and save yourself the aggravation.
About the Author: Laura Jane Thompson is the Editor in Chief of Riding Instructor University and the Feature writer for the horses section at Suite101. Follow her EquiTips on Twitter.