Have you ever been to a beekeeping supply shop and received a poor customer service experience?
If so, you're certainly not the only customer that has had this problem.
It seems like there are very few beekeeping companies that can both:
- understand the meaning of good service
- turn that understanding into reality for their customers
In this blog post, you'll discover what those few select beekeeping supply companies do to make their customer experience an absolute delight.
More...
The Bear Country Bees Take On Customer Service
If you've been following us for a while, you probably know that it's very important to us to provide incredible customer service to all of our customers.
This has become a central theme (and even a mission) for us (check out our About page if you want to know more about this)
At the end of the day, we want all of our beekeepers to have an amazing experience with beekeeping.
We want our beekeepers to (continue) saying things like:
5th Year Beekeeper
1st Year Beekeeper
We love our beekeepers and we love helping them be successful in beekeeping. It doesn't matter to us whether or not they purchase any products or supplies from us.
Put another way, we don't take this lightly because poor customer service is not an option for us.
What About Other Companies?
Unfortunately, this isn't the typical type of response you get from customers of most beekeeping supply companies.
Most companies in the industry seem to revolve around the almighty dollar instead of making the customer experience better and more enjoyable.
You don't have to look very far to see the evidences of this. Taking a look at Google reviews for some of these companies reveals a lot about how customers actually feel.
For example:
The level of intelligence on display by the owners and "help" is a fine example of why beekeeping has a hillbilly reputation.
Taken from a real Google review
OUCH!
If you run a beekeeping business, this is the last thing you'd ever want to hear.
Unfortunately, most beekeeping companies are receiving this kind of feedback on a regular basis.
Is There Any Hope For Beekeeping Supply Companies?
The simple answer is, YES!
There is hope for beekeeping companies.
I recently wrote partner article to this blog post detailing 4 things I think beekeeping supply companies need to work on to improve their (currently) poor customer service.
In that article, I tell a story about Ray Olivarez, the owner of Olivarez Honey Bees, who is one of the most impressive people I've met in the beekeeping industry (or anywhere for that matter).
The way Ray runs his business gives me a lot of hope for how beekeeping supply companies can be.
What Can Beekeeping Companies Do To Fix Their Poor Customer Service?
I won't go into all of the details of my partner article in this post (check out the full article here for details).
However, I do want to briefly mention the 4 things I think beekeeping supply companies should work on.
Here's my list:
- 1Tie customer service into the company vision
- 2Provide on-going customer service training
- 3Invest in technology that makes the customer journey seamless
- 4Solicit customer feedback on the service they received & act on it
By focusing on these 4 crucial items, I truly beekeeping supply companies can completely change current perceptions about poor customer service quality in the industry.
What Do You Think?
I go into greater depth on all 4 of these points in my article but I'm curious to know know that your thoughts are.
Do you think these four things really would make a difference to beekeeping supply companies? Why or why not? Is there anything you'd add to this list? Anything you'd take away? Do you really think beekeeping companies can fix their poor customer service?
I'd love to hear your thoughts so please leave me a comment below!
