Nothing is more important to a business than its customers. After all, without a constant stream of customers, there is little point in your business being open. But as every business owner knows, attracting customers and retaining them is no easy task.
Trying to attract customers when you operate in a competitive market is hard enough, but add the current challenging economic times to the mix, and it becomes more difficult than ever to keep a business afloat. To combat this, many companies focus their efforts on trying to attract new customers at all costs. After all, no company wants to see its competitors gaining clients, so most promotional activity is focused on increasing client recruitment. While this may seem like a logical way to sustain a customer base, it could actually be making things harder than they need to be. Instead, it is often helpful to turn your attention to your existing customers.
You may have heard the well-used fact that it costs five times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one. But did you also know that you can make more money from your existing customers? Research shows that while businesses make sales of 5% to 20% to new customers, this rises to between 60% and 70% for existing customers. This is a huge increase and much too important to ignore. So, it makes sense to focus your efforts on customer retention. But how do you retain customers?
Excellent customer service is always important, but if you want your customers to keep coming back and making repeat purchases, you need to understand how to provide them with a seamless customer experience. Here’s how you can give your customers the very best service and ensure they stay loyal to your business:
Provide Comprehensive Support
When trying to create a seamless, high-quality experience for every customer, it is crucial that you provide support at every touch point in the customer journey. Recognizing potential pain points and then identifying ways that you can provide support at the times it is most needed is a surefire way to impress your customers and ensure they are satisfied with your service.
One way to ensure that your customer support is as comprehensive as possible is to ensure that you have a wide range of ways that your team can be contacted by customers that need assistance. This could mean introducing a live chat option, providing 24/7 telephone support, and keeping your frequently asked questions (FAQs) page constantly updated. In addition, it is also helpful to monitor your social media pages constantly. Many customers now vent their frustrations and complain about businesses online and use social media platforms to facilitate this. Therefore, it is helpful to monitor your company’s social media closely and to take a proactive approach by responding quickly to any comments about your business, whether positive or negative.
Utilise Technology
Unsurprisingly, technology features heavily in every customer service offering nowadays. With this in mind, it is essential that you keep up to date with all the latest developments in customer service technology so that you can adopt the best systems for your business.
With the right technology, you will be able to provide your customers not only with comprehensive support but also with real-time updates on their queries. This can make a profound difference to the customer experience and significantly enhance it. To facilitate this comprehensive customer service, it is helpful to implement field service management software. Using this software will enable you to keep track of your team and to update customers on the exact progress of their job. So, if a customer is waiting for one of your engineers to visit, you can provide them with an estimated time of arrival based on your engineer’s current location and job status. As a resource, this is invaluable for you as a business and for your customers’ experience when using your company.
Nurture a Positive Culture
While you can implement many different strategies and introduce new technology to help provide the best customer service, it is also vital to consider your employees. Unless your team is completely on board with what you are doing and backing up your efforts every step of the way, it is almost impossible for you to offer your customers high-quality service.
Providing the best customer service only happens when you have a combination of engaged, helpful employees and the best customer service tools to facilitate this. When each of these elements works together, you will be equipped to provide the best service.
Making sure your customers are on-board and fully committed to delivering high-quality service can be tricky. Therefore, it is helpful to ensure that customer service is ingrained into your company culture.
Taking time to develop your company culture so that everyone receives fair and honest treatment is essential. When you take a positive approach to your company culture and make your employees feel valued, they are far more likely to feel positive about their roles and passionate about providing the best service to every customer. Encouraging this positive culture within your business will not only benefit your customers but your employees too.
It is also vital to ensure that your team is equipped with the knowledge they need to perform their role to the best of their abilities. Providing ongoing training is the best way to do this.
Keep things simple
When trying to retain your customers, it is easy to focus on your competitors and to start looking for increasingly elaborate ways to attract the attention of your customers. However, keeping things simple is often the best approach.
Rather than complicating your customer service efforts by trying to outdo the competition and wow your customers with gimmicks, it is often best to go back to basics. Simply offering a reliable, high-quality service and offering help and assistance to your customers whenever needed is often all that you need to provide a seamless service and retain your customer base.
