—Tom Peters, author, Re-Imagine!¹

—Sam Walton, founder of Walmart²

Communicate with Your Customer

The relationship truly begins after the sale. It is important to reach out to the customer once the sales transaction has been completed. Customers like approachable exporters, knowledgeable follow-up, and a show of a heart. Expand the relationship in a way that lets additional possibilities fall into place. Ask how everything went and what more you can do for them. Follow up with them in a week or two with a list of new ideas designed to foster the relationship. These might concern how the product they imported can be used for other purposes or how showing the product in action via a YouTube video might increase sales. Growth is vital to sustaining a long-term relationship.

You need to find out how your customer feels about you and your company after he buys your product. Only then can you determine if a customer is satisfied or if you can fix a problem. Start asking today or set up an online survey (using SurveyMonkey or MailChimp, for example) that allows customers to weigh in and evaluate the experience they had with your company. They will see that you are trying to improve your service.

Stay away from canned responses via social media channels when it is obvious a customer is angry. A canned response might be: “Thank you for choosing ABC Company for your stay. We appreciate your business!” And this could be after a firm or a person wrote: “Your accommodations were deplorable. I will never stay at your facility again, ever.” To build the relationship and learn as much as you can, strive for personal interactions with your customers to ensure each customer is treated as a priority and taken care of in the way she expects. Remind each employee that part of their job is to serve as a “brand ambassador” for the firm.

Care About and Support Your Customers

Take a humanistic approach to handling all inquiries. Show some love. And if you can’t fix the thing that made the customer unhappy, refer him to someone else who can. Remember, based on the type of product or service you export, you might need on-the-ground support in the overseas market to help your customers better understand how to sell your offering to their own customers. Always let your customers know that this extra value is available.

And listen to both what’s said and what’s not said. I once had a client whose only child had gone off to college, and I could tell it impacted him by the delays in our communications and short responses when he did reply. After asking how he was doing and how his son was coming along, he poured out to me in an e-mail what it was like to send your only child off to school and have an empty nest at home. Sometimes putting the elephant on the table or opening up a discussion with your customer about what’s going on in each other’s lives can be both cathartic and an emotional bonding opportunity that strengthens a relationship. It also shows heart and support in a time of need.

Pay Attention to Details Pertaining to Your Customers

What might seem mundane to you can make a world of difference to your customer.

Your customer likes jazz? The next time she visits you at your home office, take her to a jazz experience like no other. To you, it might seem basic or mundane, but she will be thoroughly impressed that you remembered and cared enough to do something special for her. Or maybe you have an overseas customer who loves San Francisco. When he returns to his homeland, send him off with a beautiful picture-book of San Francisco showing all the great places along with a historical perspective.

Get Everyone on the Same Page About Your Customers

The customer service mentality should permeate your entire organization. What is your commitment to customers? Does everybody in the company understand this commitment inside and out? Do you provide exemplary service? Friendly service? Accessible service? The service goal of online retailer Zappos is “Delivering happiness.”³ Define yours and carry through on it every step of the way. Ask yourself these questions to frame it:

1. What is our customer service plan (what do we stand for)?
2. Why is it important?
3. Who is responsible for it?
4. How will it get done?
5. How will it be measured?
6. How will we celebrate our customer service successes?

Tape the following motto to your wall or use it as a sign-off on your e-mails: “Everything we do is to help our customers compete more effectively and win in their marketplace.” Also, create your own statement about what you want to make happen for your customers and then offer some extra-valued or even “free” perks related to it. Based on the statement “I want to allow distributors to win an all-expense-paid trip to the company’s home base if they bring us X amount of business in a quarter,” you could sign the distributors up for your company newsletter, feature them on your blog, produce a monthly newsletter offering them tips on how to use your product or service in ways they didn’t think of, and direct them to where they should go for reorders.

Set Up a Mother Ship Service Counter for Your Customers

All customers need a home base to revert to in good times and bad. Set up a “mother ship” center for handling them. It can be one person in the company who holds down the fort or it can be a hundred-person effort. Train all of your employees to anticipate and respond to customer inquiries with care and to take every inquiry seriously. Make them responsible for handling e-mail inquiries, phone calls, social media inquiries, and so forth.

Treat Your Customers like Your Partner or Spouse

Ever hear the expression “How a man treats his mother is how he will treat his wife”? The same theory applies to business owners and their employees. How a business owner treats her employees is an indication of how she will treat her customers. If treated well, employees will be more likely to go the extra mile in their work with customers. If treated badly, they’ll be less likely to put forth great care and work ethic.

Let’s take a time where a customer visited me in Chicago and asked me to accompany him on a tour of a supplier’s facilities in Boston—on a day’s notice. It’s standard procedure to accompany your customer to the supplier’s plant, so I immediately got on the phone to book the flight. Lo and behold, there were no seats. My customer said it was not a problem and that he would make the trip alone. Then I checked another airline and found that it had a red eye at 4 a.m. I booked the flight but decided not to tell the customer. I arrived at the plant much, much earlier than his appointment time. You should have seen the look on his face when he showed up and saw me there! He thought it had to be too good to be true. My point: I treated this customer as if I were meeting my spouse at an important event—and I did so without hesitation.

Create an Experience for Your Customer

When you buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks, it’s not just about the coffee; it’s about the experience—who you might see, who might see you, what work you might do on your laptop, what music might be playing, or what news is circulating in the neighborhood. Or maybe you want to have private, unrushed time all for yourself. Yes, the coffee tastes good, but if everything else were terrible, would you go back for that great cup of coffee? According to Dori Jones Yang and Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz, “The underlying foundation of this company [Starbucks] is not about growth. It is about the passionate, soulful connection we have with our people, our customers, and our shareholders.”⁴ The spirited human connection, sanctuary-type experience, and great cup of coffee are what keeps customers coming back to Starbucks.

You are not exporting a product or service. You are exporting an experience for your customer that comes in a bundle that includes access to and interaction with you. Eliminate or reduce one part of the bundle and the customer will leave you and take his business elsewhere. I strongly believe, as Tom Peters says, that a “quality” customer experience correlates to customer loyalty, so get it right! You can run your export business as a “transaction-based experience” where you just get the deal done or you can run it as an “experienced-based brand” where every touch point relates to the superiority of your product or service. If it’s the latter, what will that entail?

Think back to Vosges Haut Chocolate that I talked about earlier in the book. With a slogan of “Vosges Haut-Chocolat invites you to travel the world through chocolate,” a mission of “Peace, love and chocolate,” and the invitation “Ring our chocolate concierge” all posted in the “Contact Us” area of the site, Vosges is most definitely an “experienced-based brand” offering exceptional service at every point of interaction with the company.

Create a High Standard for Your Customer Service

Raise your own expectations of what you believe your customer should get from you. Set up a high standard involving a heightened set of expectations for customer service and then meet them effectively. Give your employees ways to reward customers and show them how much you care.

Maybe your customer needs delivery within a month. Reduce the time it takes for her to get the product to three weeks and maintain that on future orders. Or maybe your customer needs a special loading configuration where the product is delivered in a container. Follow her instructions and do the shipment to her liking.

Give Time to Your Customers

One of the most undervalued benefits that we can give a customer is our time. Set aside a certain amount of time each day, week, or month to devote to your customers. Ensure that their needs are being met personally and promptly. Your time is valuable. They know that. When you give your time, you show customers they are worth it.

My general rule for responding to customer communications is to do so within twenty-four hours. What’s yours? When customers want to see you, get an e-mail from you, or speak with you, devote time to providing them the service they require. It’s a valuable commodity to customers.

Stay Away from the Status Quo with Your Customers

Once a good customer relationship has been established, it’s easy to get comfortable. As the exporter, you might rely on the status quo (which equals doing nothing) with your customer after the sale, but his needs will change over time. Check in with him. Silence isn’t always golden and it can’t hurt to get a status update more often than not to find out what your customer may or may not need.

Oh, and one last bonus philosophy that I know most of you already do: Thank a customer for their business in person or via the telephone. Then follow up by expressing further sincere appreciation via e-mail. These are musts, absolutes, givens. Don’t miss a beat here.

If I were to sum up in one sentence how I approach my clients during and after a sale, it would be this: I provide the service, I’m interested, I care, and I will do my best to help.