Customers will choose to do business with you because you provide a better all-around customer experience. Here are five things you do to provide that better experience:

• Pay attention to your initial greeting, whether in person, on the phone, on email or chat, is always prompt, genuinely pleasant and sincere. You use that positive first impression as a springboard to developing a real dialogue with your customer.

• Ensure that Doing business with you is a smooth process. Your customers can easily get in touch with you, consult you, place an order and also get them swiftly. You need to deliberately think about all the steps that your customers will need to interface with your business and create process and options for your customer. Creating a smooth process is not the easiest thing to do, if it was, everyone would have a good process. Once you can do this, you would have succeeded in building a better business.

• Established trust. While this is not easy to do in your first interaction with a customer, you realize that the building of trust begins with that first contact, and grows exponentially with each subsequent positive experience. Real trust is built like a building, from the ground up, with a strong foundation.

• Be friendly, yet professional to every customer with whom you interact. Be sure however, that you are also tactful when dealing with customers. For example, you won’t apply the same level of friendliness to a customer who is in a bad mood or in a hurry and a customer who is chatty and enthusiastic.

• Be attentive and listen to your customers, even the things that are not said. There are customers who prefer to be assisted while there are some others who would rather do it all by yourself. Remember it’s all about your customers’ preference and not yours. Be courteous and offer to help if needed allows the customer to determine the extent of his interaction with you, and that makes for a comfortable experience for all types of customers and prospects.

The goal is to ensure that the service you provide remain in the customer’s mind long after the product purchased has run its course.