Customer Service Goals: 6 Ways To Get Repeat Business
Your customer service goals should always include gaiing repeat business. After al, it’s said that it takes SEVEN times the effort to get a new customer han to keep an existing one. Are you having issues keeping customers?
One of the pitfalls of being an online store is the lack of face to face interaction with customers. Customers are your bread and butter so your customer service goals have to be finely tuned.
Your customers are the ones buying your product and reviewing it to their friends, on their social media and whenever they have your product in their home.
They’re the ones that are going to keep your company growing, diversifying and improving year after year. If you’re not making customer service goals your absolute priority, then I’m afraid you’re doing business the wrong way.
You cannot hope to be a good entrepreneur if you’re not focusing on your customers and how you can generate more income from them.
When a customer buys a product from you, you want them to come back again and again to buy more from you. You want them to be able to recommend your name to others and get other people buying from you, too.
The only way that you’re going to be able to achieve this is in the experience that you give to them. Marketing correctly to people is your best strategy here, and it’s so much more than just creating exciting campaigns, handing out freebies to customers and figuring out how to reward them.
You need to have a savvy combination of excellent branding and customer relationship management to have a loyal customer base that will continue to come back to you.
You also need to have sound SEO services, a dazzling business website and a real commitment to offering sound business services.
One of the best ways that you can give your customers the best possible experience – even as an online store – is to mimic a brick and mortar store with your customer service goals. This means taking what a physical shop experience would give customers and turn it into one that your online shop can manage.
Being memorable is the only essential that you need, because once people remember your company, they will always come back again.
Consistency may be important in business but being memorable trumps it! If you are more memorable as a company, people will always make a conscious effort to keep you successful.
Driving customers to your door with exciting marketing campaigns is relatively easy but getting them to continue to return is the difficulty. You’ve done the hard work by putting together your marketing plan and spreading the word about your business on every conceivable platform.
A strong customer relationship will maintain engagement and keep people remembering your name when they want to buy certain products. Below, you’ll find six ways that you can keep your customers coming back to your business over and over.
Be Easy.
So many people get turned away from small business owners simply because they’re not easy to deal with. Lax communication, abrupt replies, shoddy packaging; each of these things shows such little care.
Checking your company email, voicemail and social media inboxes regularly will mean that you can’t miss any customer messages.
Delegate this job to staff if necessary, but don’t compromise on the care that you offer to your customers. You need to be open to improvement where you can. If you’re having a bad day, don’t take that out on the customers who are willing to buy from you.
Don’t spend your time feeling wound-up by customers: a thicker skin is necessary in customer service.
Be Valuable.
You need to be able to outdo your competition. If you are offering similar products to another online store, you have to do it better – whether this is by price, quality, reliability of delivery and the way you answer messages and interact on social media.
People will only buy from you if they can see a value in what you are offering. Providing a great service shouldn’t be you going above and beyond for customers; it should be your normal.
Make a list of what makes you different from all the other retailers out there, then apply logic and reason to those differences.
Maximise them where you can and make customer service goals and their experiences your priority at all times.
Be Available.
Communication is so important to customers. Customers are also very impatient; if they ask you a question, they want an answer as quickly as possible, not in fourteen working days.
It’s so vital that you keep the lines of communication open with your customers, and this includes emailers and catching up.
Sometimes, it’s good to remind your customers that you are there. Sending out an email full of good offers is going to help your previous buyers to remember that you are still around.
When you are on social media, don’t bring communication to private message where the public can’t see it – do everything publicly so that you can be seen to interact with your customers appropriately and with grace.
Be Humble.
You are going to make mistakes in the course of your business dealings; it doesn’t make you weak, it makes you human.
The key when you make mistakes is to hold your hands up and admit to them. Your customers will respect you and appreciate you far more if you are the type of business owner who will admit when things have gone a little wrong.
They are far more likely to support you as a result, especially when you apologise and overcompensate a little!
Be Mindful.
As a business owner, you need to listen to your customers and their concerns and actually pay attention to them.
There is no point in marketing yourself as a respectable business owner if you don’t listen closely to the feedback that you get from people.
If the overwhelming majority of people fed back to you that one of your products is flawed, then it makes sense to review it and see whether changes should be made.
Be Appreciative.
The reach that you can get on social media and via your online store will generate good business for you, but if you’re not seeing how you could be taking customers for granted, there could be a problem.
There may be a day that you end up with zero sales or interest in your products and services, which means that something has gone wrong somewhere.
Where you can, you should ensure that you are working as hard as you can so that every first-time customer becomes a repeat customer.
No matter how good your product, there is no guarantee that people will come back and buy from you again.
Your business should be long-term and sustainable and by following the six customer service goals above, you can get exactly what you want from your customers and keep your business as steady as ever.
Your business can never put too much emphasis on the importance of good customer service. If you have a customer services or sales team that is the primary contact for your customers, you should ensure that you are updating their training regularly so they are able to handle the customers and the volume of calls regularly.
Your success is going to be dependent on how you treat the people that buy from you, and when you treat your customers well, the world is going to hear about it.
Word of mouth is your most valuable marketing tool at your disposal. All you have to do is give your customers something to rave about, and you’ll be creating new customer bases as well as an increasingly loyal one.
Insanely Clever Marketing 