Customer service is generally perceived a burden than a mean to make money. Most businesses dedicate as little time and resource as possible to attend complaints and solve the problems faced by customers. But, in reality customer service is no less essential to any business than creating products and selling them. With the right mindset, customers can be transformed from mere buyers to individuals that can highly contribute to the growth of your business.
Building loyal customers base
Getting customers is tough. Yet, keeping them should be easier. But with fierce competitors with aggressive marketing on price, you have to put real energy and effort into maintaining a consistent customer base. Just providing a great product or service is rarely enough to keep them coming back for more.
Make sure you know who your customers are and find ways to build direct relationships with them. Many businesses fail at this by having no means of keeping in touch with their existing customers. They don’t know who they are or how many times they’ve purchased from them. Every day that passes and your business isn’t keeping track of who you are dealing with is a missed opportunity.
Ultimately, the more direct contact you have with your customers, the less you should have to spend on marketing to the masses.
Learning from feedback
Whether you like it or not, customers are posting (or sharing) feedbacks about your products and services on forums and social media sites.
What your customers say is incredibly valuable. If you are aiming to provide good quality products or service, great feedback from previous buyers makes it easier for prospects to turn into customers.
Researches have revealed it’s likely that you can exceed a 10% rise in sales from a good feedback system than a traditional ad based marketing. Furthermore, you will gain additional benefits from improved search engine positions.
Encouraging referrals
Referrals from existing customers are one of the best ways to acquire new customers, because when someone you trust tells you to check out a product, you’re almost certainly going to give it a shot.
One way to encourage customers to refer their friends is to use an incentive program that offer users a reward or points in exchange of sharing a content or page with friends.
Another simple way to encourage referrals is to offer social media sharing options on your order confirmation page. So after a person has placed an order online, they are presented with something along the lines of “Share this with friends and people you care about” along with social media buttons that’ll post just that for them.
