Great customer service is essential for retaining a business' customers. Yet many businesses do not follow the golden rules of customer service (which are a bit more complex than simply treating others as you would like to be treated). Here are three of the biggest keys to outstanding customer service:

Know what your customers want

The only way to know what your customers want, is to ask them. Otherwise, you are relying on your own skill to successfully guess what their needs might be. The danger in doing so is that sometimes you may be right, but you can just as often be very wrong. Great customer service means getting feedback from your customers, no matter how tough it may be to hear about the problems within your business. Customers know what they want, and finding this out from them is always the first step towards resolving customer service issues.

Fix the problems, then check back with the customer

Once you know for certain why customers are dissatisfied, then the next step is to fix the problems. Many businesses have customer feedback boxes, or get comments from customers to customer service employees. Yet, often no action is taken, or the customer's issues fall through the cracks with no resolution. If customers take the time to provide feedback about problems, your business should take the time to resolve them. If the resolution is not acceptable to your customers, you will find out one way or the other. By far, the best way to determine this is by checking with your customer, to see if the solution you propose works for them. Even if you decide that a problem cannot be resolved, letting customers know that their concerns have been heard can make them feel understood, and more sympathetic to you than if they believe you do not care about them.

Fix every customer problem only once

The key to only fixing customer problems once, is by creating a system to ensure that the most problematic errors do not occur again. In this way, you may pay for a business mistake with one customer, but you do not have to keep paying the price (in loss of faith) by having that customer experience the problem again, or worse yet, having other customers customer service experience the same problem. Fixing each problem only once prevents you from having ongoing issues, which can both waste your energy, and diminish your business' valuable customer service reputation.

So, when you know what customers want, fix their problems and verify that the solution works for them, and fix each customer issue only once, your business is well on the way to keeping customers delighted.