Your customers are one of your best assets. One word can make or break a brand, if it’s spoken by someone loud or influential enough. Review sites are saturated with horror stories and fairy tales alike. To avoid that one star review, ask yourself: are you doing any of these five things?
- Study data
Some businesses use customer relationship management (CRM) strategies to review their interaction with shoppers. The goal of these strategies is sales growth: getting new customers and keeping the existing ones.
CRM approaches can assist businesses in ‘predicting’ what their customers want based on their activity. Look at the data on your website and other channels. What was engaging? Where were the most bounces? Have you gotten any unsubscribes from offers or newsletters?
- Be responsive
Don’t leave your customers hanging! On Facebook Business pages, ‘response time’ indicators on the side tell customers how quickly staff respond to messages. The faster, the better. These days we live in a world of instant gratification, especially in digital. You’ll disappoint some people if you can’t reply right away.
What’s the best response time? No longer than a day, if you can help it. Customers pay for customer service, and they feel at ease knowing their situation is getting handled.
- Be honourable
Customers remember promises, especially the ones that don’t get honoured. And they’ll tell their friends, who pass the word on. Bad CRM = decline.
If you want to turn your customers into your cheer squad, follow up on whatever’s outlined in your service policy. When you promise to investigate, do it. Honour the commitments you made and get back to them quickly. This isn’t just good service, it also builds trust.
- Think about the gaps
Look at your competitors. What are they doing that you aren’t. And can you do it better? Customers love free stuff, like downloadable content they can review later. How-to guides, newsletters, and birthday offers are great to keep the customers coming back.
Also, create incentives for them to bring their friends to you through some kind of marketing campaign. If you create a ‘bring a friend for points/rewards etc’ offer, you’ll keep your existing customer base while expanding on it.
- Invest in your business
Train the staff you have in CRM, and hire some customer service superstars that live and breathe to make their lives easier. Get some automation software if you have to and make sure you know how to use it properly.
Turning your customers into your brand’s cheerleaders takes effort, but the result is worth it. People remember amazing customer service and will recommend you to their friends based on their experience.
