If you keep a customer happy they are likely to tell four other people about their positive experience and they are highly likely to refer you to others.

You can only lose your reputation once. Research has shown that if you upset a customer they may tell eleven other people about it!

Remember referrals cost nothing to market. The most important business system you can put in place is customer satisfaction.
 
So here are some of the things to think about when designing a system for keeping customers happy and getting referrals:

1.    Regularly review your customers needs and wants; either by survey, face to face or telephone. Be prepared to adapt your products or services to changing circumstances.

2.      Install customer care as the number one system in your business, discuss this with all employees and agree a system that puts the customer first.

3.    Get regular feedback – ask customers “How are we doing?”

4.    If the response to (3) above is positive – ask them “Do you know anyone else we could help?”

5.    Measure how many referrals are given to you, it is quite simply the most cost effective form of marketing you can do.

6.    Regularly review your policies.

....and what happens when you have built up that reputation?

1.    Deliver. The easiest way to build and keep a good reputation is to promise a high-quality product or service and then to produce the goods consistently well.

2.    Keep everybody in the business “Onside”. It is not enough that owners and employees are simply aware of the importance of reputation. Unless you all buy into it completely and with conviction, it will not work.

Plan – for the worst. The easiest way to turn a minor crisis into a major disaster is not to know how to handle it. In every area of your operation, ask what could happen that would be most damaging to your reputation. Then, plan for that worst case scenario (and any other less fatal but still damaging possibility).