Top 10 Tips to Prepare for an Ecstatic Birth:

1. Plan this event like you would plan your wedding, so that every detail serves your
pleasure. You wouldn't choose a catering hall known for lousy food for your reception and just
hope for the best, would you? Choose every detail of the birth with your highest pleasure in mind.
And yes, that includes thinking about what you will wear.

2. Flood yourself with positive birth stories, images, and videos. Consciously reprogram your
cultural concept of birth.

3. Knowledge is power. Enrolling in the most comprehensive childbirth education class you can
find is just the starting point. Educate yourself about every aspect of birth.

4. Begin a desire list for your birth. Write down every birth desire you have, however large or
small. Read and update the list regularly.

5. Be honest with yourself and your partner about your fears. Contemplate how you can
support yourself through each one. Birth counseling can often be a very powerful tool.

6. Do whatever it takes for you to feel healthy, strong, and beautiful. This often includes eating
well, getting appropriate exercise, and enjoying your maternal curves.

7. Connect with your sensuality often. Notice the conditions that turn you on, that enable you to
relax and open. Include as many of these into your birthing environment as possible.

8. Practice listening to your intuition every day. Sit, breathe, relax, and listen.

9. Breathe deeply. All the time. Especially when you are stressed.

10. Gather SUPPORT!! Surround yourself with people who will cheer lead you and enable your
vision during pregnancy and especially in the birthing room. Don't forget to look beyond birth and
make sure that you will be well supported postpartum, so your attention can be on enjoying your
baby.

12 Actions You Can Take To Make Your Customers Feel Ecstatic

As a result of my recent experience in a Lush shop (the company is really called Lush – I’m not trying to get down with the kids!), I thought I would share some tangible actions you can use to make your customers ecstatic!

Read about my recent customer service experience here: Great Customer Service
If you’ve ever looked in to courses or advice about customer service, you’re probably familiar with the theory that underpins great customer retention.

People are always telling us we need to make our clients feel unique, or special, or heard.

The Problem…It’s Just Theory

The problem with this kind of advice is it looks great on paper, and we can nod and agree with every principle, but it’s a bit like eating candy floss.
Great at the time, but it fizzles away in to nothing as soon as it’s finished.
The problem with theories is that we can understand them, but translating them in to tangible actions can be tougher than we may first think.
I know that I need to make my customers feel unique, in theory.

But what does that actually mean, in terms of concrete activities I can do?
Let’s take a look at the top twelve real, actionable ways we can make our customers come back again and again, through great service.
They fall in to three categories:

• making them feel unique

• listening to them

• communicating with them

Let’s delve into each one…

Make them feel unique

OK, here’s that principle again.
To turn it in to an action, we need to understand what feeling unique may be.

For me, it’s about real steps:

1. Send your customer a thank you message when they have been using your services for a set period of time. It’s about remembering who they are, when they joined you, and tracking what they have purchased from you so they know you fully understand them
2. Visit their blog or company web site, and support their business through comments and interaction
3. Be proactive about your customer proposition, offering long-term customers incentives to stay with you such as discounted rates once they have been with you for a year, or a loyalty scheme where regular users get special offers and services which you would not provide for new clients
4. Where possible, use the services of your own customers, supporting by offering them your business, just as they bring you their own.

Listen to them

One of the primary goals for business owners is to make our customers feel as if we understand them and their needs, and can respond to them.

In a tangible way, this means…

1. Remembering their name, even if it means keeping a database of all your contacts, and letting them know that you remember who they are, and what they require from you
2. Hearing exactly what they are saying to you, making notes of what they have said, keeping their mails and revisiting their messages before you get in touch, so every time you speak to a client you know exactly who they are, what they want, and how you can help
3. Being practical. If you know that a specific solution could benefit your customer, put it forward to them even if this means that you can’t charge them as much as if you had delivered their original request
4. Making the effort to sit down before making contact, and considering what they need from you, and then proposing the ideal, tailored solution to meet their needs.

It’s harder than you think to listen, and actually good listening is much more about strong administrative processes than being quiet and taking in what they are saying!

Communicate with them

Staying in regular contact with your customers is much more than dropping them a spammy newsletter once a month.

Strong communication involves:

1. Mailing them directly to give them an update about what you have been doing, calling them by their name, and avoiding corporate-style whitewash correspondence that only serves to frustrate them
2. Communicating with your clients well by calling them up on a schedule, to let them know you are there and asking if they need anything
3. When you deliver a piece of work or a service, call your customer up and get their feedback, and make changes based upon what they say
4. When you meet someone who could benefit from networking with another of your customers, offer to link them both up to help them out. If you’re in your customer’s part of the world, offer to drop in for a coffee and a catch up to do some proper networking. Hold your customers in your mind at all times, and think through how you can take real actions to show that you are thinking of them.

The boomerang effect (i.e. ensuring customers come back time and time again) is simple to achieve, if you build in real activities to a strong schedule. Your customer relationship strategy is just as vital to your ongoing business success as the products you provide and the service you give, so you can up your retention rate by actively applying the principles of service that we all know.