Why Your Customers Need Choice

/in /by

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Consumers|Why Your Customers Need ChoiceThe consumer world today is filled with options. Consumers no longer have to pay with cash or credit card. They don’t have a limited choice of high street shops to get the things that they need. They can choose from countless online shops, offering similar products. Ranges are enormous, and the options are numerous. It can be hard for a small business to keep up. But, you should make some effort to offer at least the basic choices to your customers. Here’s why.

Offer Choice Because Everyone Else Does

Because we’re so used to choice, we expect it, but we also need it. When it comes to paying, for example, there’s no longer just one way to do it. Shops, both online and in-store, give us options. We have different banks and kinds of card. Some people use Apple Pay for all online purchases. Others prefer PayPal. This means that your customers will have their own payment preferences. If you don’t offer them different payment gateway choices, you risk losing custom if they haven’t got what they need to complete a transaction.

Another area that you need to offer choice is the methods in which your customers contact you. Many businesses today speak to their customers via Facebook Messenger, but you may have customers that don’t have a Facebook account. Offer your customers plenty of options, and there’s no chance that someone will be unable to contact you if they need to. This can boost loyalty, improve the service that you can offer, and give you much greater opportunities to keep in touch.

You Need to Offer An Easy Service

If you want your customers to keep coming back, you need to make things easy for them. Offering them choices like how to pay, how to shop, product ranges and different services can make their shopping experience much easier.

More Choice Can Help You To Grow

When it comes to products, giving your customers choices of styles, colours, price points, services and sizes can help you to grow your business. It means that you’ll be able to offer something for everyone, appealing to a broader market. It also means that your customers will keep coming back for more. Say you sell clothes, if they love a dress, and you release the same one in different colors or prints, they’ll buy more, especially if it’s a great fit and good quality.

But There Is Such a Thing as Too Much Choice

While you want to offer exceptional service, an easy experience and enough options to keep your customers happy, you don’t want to dilute your brand, overwhelm your customers or make things confusing. Nor do you want to sacrifice the quality of your products so that you can offer more.

It’s vital that you work to find the right balance. Spend time finding ways to offer your customers the options that they need to make shopping as easy as possible. They should be able to find what they want and buy it easily, without having to worry about how they’ll pay. But, when it comes to products, listen to their feedback. Find out what people love, ask them what kind of options and extras they might want, and don’t offer too much. Make sure quality is your priority.

Are You Giving Your Customers What They Deserve?

/in /by

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Customers|Are You Giving Your Customers What They Deserve?Your customers are the backbone of your business. They make sure profit is trailing in and out of your company, and they help to make sure your website is ranked at the top of google, with the amount of traffic that flows in and out of your ecommerce option day by day. Indeed, you start a business with the sole aim of finding and obtaining customer loyalty, to find the market that your product suits the best, and to guarantee they come back again and again.

And if you feel that customer loyalty is in short supply around here, it’s time to look into one of the most potential reasons why: your customers feel they aren’t getting what they deserve. They come to you for a good experience and a great product, and a couple of their expectations are falling short. But why? Well, let’s examine the idea below.

Are Your Prices Right?

Your customers may feel they’re getting a better deal elsewhere, or they feel they have the potential to from taking just one look at the prices lining your shelves. They might feel you’re overselling your products, and they’re not getting value for money, and they might just hate you for it!

So it’s key to research the market you’re operating in as well as the local area you’ll be selling from. If you’re an online only store, you need to know your niche, and the common prices across it; you’ll need to try and match them, as closely as possible. And if you’ve got a physical location as well, make sure your prices don’t stick out like a sore thumb on the high street.

Are You Shipping on Time?

Your customers may feel they aren’t being treated right in the delivery process. They might feel it takes way too long to receive their packages, or they might feel that it costs a lot of money for something they’ve bought to be shipped out to them. Of course, unless you’re offering international delivery, your customers will likely find it steep for you to be charging more than $3 for national shipping.

You can get quite a nice discount deal with various shippers, if you’re worried about not being able to get costs down. Even using third party logistics companies could work well for you – navigating away from the mainstream delivery has a high chance of saving you some pennies, so don’t be afraid to use a different shipment company to get your products out there.

Are You Offering the Right Rewards?

Finally, your customers may feel their loyalty is unrewarded, and thus, they stop shopping with you and go somewhere they feel appreciated. And this could be solved with a simple rewards program! Money off coupons, free products upon collecting enough stamps, etc. These are all viable options to keep your market interested.

Make sure your customers are getting what they deserve from you. Guarantee a good experience and they’ll come back for more.

Ways That You Can Improve Your Customer Care With Technology

/in /by

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Customer Care|Ways That You Can Improve Your Customer Care With TechnologyWhen it comes to technology, there are a number of ways that it can benefit your company. You can use less paper – good for the environment and also for the state of your office! – and you can make a lot of processes within your office run a whole lot more efficiently. But it can also benefit your customers, thereby raising your standard of customer care. Here are a few tips on how you can do that…

You Can Provide Information Easily

Thankfully, technology has made it super easy to provide information to your customers. Your website is supposed to be your first online port of call, so make it a good one. It should be instantly clear what your product is and what it should be used for: don’t provide too much information on the first page, because people will zone out, but go into a more in depth explanation on your ‘About Us’ page. You should also make sure that you should use your site to show customers how they can easily get in contact with you through phone, email, and social media. You could also consider providing a postal address on there, although remember that if you don’t have a physical premises yet, a PO box is just fine.

You Can Give Them What They Actually Want

Using analytics software, it’s extremely easy to see what your customers want. You can see how they interact with your company through emails and newsletters that you send out, through your social media feeds, through your app, through your website, through your blog… the list is endless. You can use the data that you collect to analyse what your customers prefer, meaning that you can provide more of that to them instead of irrelevant and boring information that will annoy and frustrate them. Figuring out what the customers want means that you can provide this information to your sales team, who will be able to target them and provide them with the exact services and products that they actually desire.

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Customer Care|Ways That You Can Improve Your Customer Care With TechnologyYou Can Connect With Them Over Social Media

Social media has made building a relationship with your clients easier than it ever has been before. You need to consider exactly what sort of company voice you want to use: a lot of businesses settle on a business-like but friendly tone, but if you’re aiming at a younger market then you could also look into hiring a social media expert who speaks the language of memes and emojis in a way that can connect to younger people. You can demonstrate through your social media that you answer questions, that you’re always available, and that you provide simple solutions to any problems that people might have. Keep calm, don’t interact with trolls, and make sure that you post regularly.

You Can Keep Their Data Secure

Security is something that is hugely important to everyone, and technology can thankfully help to make sure that data is stored in a secure way, rather than on paper in filing cabinets in your office. You can encrypt data, password protect it, and make sure that only certain people can access it. This is particularly important when it comes to personal information like contact addresses and numbers, and even more so, payment methods.

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Customer Care|Ways That You Can Improve Your Customer Care With TechnologyYou Can Outsource To Speciality Companies

Not everyone is completely adept at using technology, and if that sounds familiar, remember there’s absolutely no shame in outsourcing. A copywriter for your website blog is a great idea, a social media expert for your Twitter feed, and an IT company to run your IT services. It’s a good idea to hire a company that’s specific to the field that you work in: for example, a healthcare IT expert will have different skills from a company that’s used to running small online stores. Outsourcing can be difficult if you’re used to running a company mostly by yourself, but remember that you didn’t start your business to struggle with computers, with payroll, with other aspects of the business that you can’t quite get your head around – there’s no shame in enlisting experts to make those aspects of your company as good as possible.

You Can Ask For Their Opinions

Technology makes it incredibly easy to ask your customers for their opinions. You can post polls on Instagram to see what lipstick shade you could bring out, or you could make it more serious and send out surveys to see how your customer service is rated after people buy products and services from you.

It’s never been easier to build great relationships with your customers – technology has made it incredibly fast and simple to reach out to people and to provide them with what they need.

Current Marketing Strategies that will Help Improve Customer Service

/in /by

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Customer Service|Current Marketing Strategies that will Help Improve Customer ServiceTypically, most owners of large businesses will have a marketing department and a customer service team, each with its own lists of responsibilities. But in order to truly make a big business and enterprise succeed, these two entities should mesh their services, at least some of the time.

For examples on how business owners can elevate their corporate customer service with the help of some top-notch marketing services, please consider the following examples:

Follow Up with Customers

In order to provide outstanding customer service, it’s vital business owners learn more about their customers’ experiences with their company, including what brought them to the business in the first place, what went well and what could be improved upon.

For example, the marketing team could send follow-up emails that ask whether the buyer has or is enjoying the product or service and then thank them for their response. Large companies can also contact customers by email to offer them a special “thank you” for shopping with us coupon or discount code on a future purchase.

Offer a Modern Customer Service Platform

To help ensure each and every customer has a great experience while placing an order or contacting a large enterprise for any reason, owners should consider adding an innovative cloud contact center and IVR system to their customer service platform.

For instance, if a marketing plan includes a goal to offer customer support 24/7, an IVR system is a great option. And for business owners who feel automated agents are impersonal and confusing to customers, this is definitely not the case with an IVR system, which are designed to provide a highly-personalized customer experience to help customers get the answers they need through features like in-queue self-service.

This modern IVR solution can even predict a caller’s intent based on recent transactions, meaning if a customer is calling back to follow up on a previous question, the IVR system can determine this and cut right to the chase.

Boost the CSR Team’s Training and Seek Feedback

Even if a business owner thinks their customer service team is performing well overall, there are still areas in which these employees can improve. Experts say enterprises should hold regular training and refresher courses that will help customer service teams improve their skills.

Topics to cover include empathy and patience, as well as general updates in the company’s products and services. This way, if a confused customer calls in and has questions about a potential new product, the customer service rep will remain friendly and patient, and will be able to accurately discuss recently launched products, services and prices.

To make this type of training less dry for your team, business owners can role play with them by taking turns to play the part of the challenging customer. To ensure this ongoing training is “sticking” and everyone is on board with the company’s policy, business owners should then follow up with customers and asking them to rate their customer service rep through a rating system sent out via email or a series of quick questions over the phone.

Marketing and CSR Departments Combined are a Powerful Force

Rather than view their marketing and customer service teams as disparate teams, owners of large companies should look for ways to combine their powers — at least some of the time.

By offering ongoing training, following up with customers and giving them access to a user-friendly and modern customer service platform, businesses should see a tangible boost in customer retention and satisfaction numbers.

Developing Trust With Your Customers

/in /by

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Customer Service|Developing Trust With Your CustomersPeople tend to think that it’s the quality of a company’s products or services that determine how much success they’re going to have. And it’s true that they are important, but if a business is going to reach its full potential, then there has to be a solid foundation of trust between the company and its customers. Without it, there’s only so far that they can go — and it really isn’t all that far. As such, it’s important that you’re taking steps to develop your customer’s faith in your business. We take a look at a few ways how below.

Make Yourself Available

You could have the best products at the best prices, but if there’s no-one there to answer the questions and concerns of your customers, then there will be a trust issue. If you’re running a business exclusively online, then make no mistake: you need to make yourself available. People are understandably cautious when it comes to buying online, so you really need to show them that you’re trustworthy. If you have a phone number they can call, and answer your email and social media comments quickly, then you’ll be on the right path.

Consistent Performances

Trust is built over time. A new company has no credibility; with them, it could go either way. You can’t win your customer’s trust overnight — you have to do it by offering a high level of service over an extended period. They need to see that you’re reliable. This can happen in various ways: first, you can just build up your website, and your positive reviews. That takes time. You’ll also need to be reliable in other ways, such as always being online. People have doubts if a site is always going offline and/or is slow, so make sure you’re working with a company that offers managed IT services. They’ll ensure that you’re always online and ready for business.

Do What You Say You’ll Do

It’s all good and well promising a customer the world, but if you can’t deliver it, then you’ll end up doing more harm than good. People prefer honesty over boasts! If delivery is going to realistically going to take five days rather than three, then make sure they know it. You don’t impress anyone by telling them how good you are — you just have to show them, and let them come to their own conclusions.

Handling Problems

It doesn’t matter how watertight your ship might seem, eventually you’re going to run into a mistake that affects a customer. This doesn’t have to be the end of the world, providing you take care of the issue. People are pretty forgiving so long as the business does all that’s within its power to rectify the mistake.

Build Your Authority

Finally, look at building your authority. If you know a lot about your products and services, then share the knowledge through blogs, podcasts, and your social media accounts. You’ll quickly become trusted as the go-to company in your field.