Congratulations: Your customer list is growing from paper-based to computer-based rapidly...maintaining that original excellent customer service can become a real challenge. Here are eight ways you can maintain a solid foundation in your customer service in which to grow:

Write a Personal Mission Statement
Often, when you are just getting started on business development, spelling out the importance of quality and customer service in a mission statement isn't necessary. However, as your customer list grows, so does the need to highlight your commitment to customer service. A personal mission statement helps by providing guidance and focus.

Develop a Long-Term Strategy
As your business grows, you may notice that you get so wrapped up in day-to-day concerns that you stop planning. If you keep reacting to what's in front of you, customer service gets degraded by continually having to patch up the symptoms of service problems rather than fixing the real causes of the problem. To get yourself out of this trap, create and implement a one-year strategy that covers six key areas:

Marketing and sales
Technology
Company culture (or your place in the company culture)
Quality service
Finance
Human resources for assistants you need

Hold an Off-Site Retreat at Least Once a Year
It will become necessary, as your customer list grows, to surround yourself with key assistants. Take your key assistants and advisors on a one-to-three-day off-site retreat for big picture strategic planning.

Write and Implement a Marketing Plan
A continual challenge to many business people is striking a balance between delivering quality service to current customers while, at the same time, marketing to find new ones. Writing and implementing a formal marketing plan can help you to organize your activities by planning:

How you will allocate your sales and marketing resources
How to further develop the markets you already have
Which new markets are worth going after

Update Your Technology
Technology, being a capital investment (and usually an expensive one at that), is often the last area a rapidly growing business developer invests in. However, in order to maintain excellent service as you grow, telephone systems, hardware, software and other related technology must be able to adequately handle the increased workload.

Invest in Developing Your Customer service staff
Don't take the sink-or-swim approach by hiring customer service staff, throwing assistants into the job without any training, and hoping that, by some process of osmosis, they will learn what they need to. This approach always results in poor quality, bad service and frustrated assistants. As you grow, continue to develop your assistants by training them in the specifics of their jobs so that they are empowered to help customers to the best of their ability.

Create an Orientation Program
Communicating your personal service philosophy to your assistants right from the start is essential. Once upon a time, when your customer list was smaller and your customers were considered family, service values were probably easier to communicate. As you grow, these guiding principles of service can get lost in the daily workload and an assistant orientation helps introduce and formalize the priorities you place on customer service.

Create a Customer Survey
Business people building a growing customer list sometimes say, "We don't need to survey our customers, we know who they are and what they want." While this may be true when you are just starting out, it's easy to get out of touch with your customers as you grow bigger. Get into the habit of conducting a formal customer service survey at least once a year so that you have a dependable and up-to-date method of collecting information necessary for future developments within your business.

Again, congratulations! Growing your customer list into a long-term profitable business should be gratifying to you and your assistants...consider these eight thoughts as a roadmap.

Excuse me for now. I have to call that customer I've been thinking about contacting for the past two months and keep our business relationship alive and active.