Non-Paying Customers and How to Handle Them

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Non-paying Customers|Non-Paying Customers and How to Handle ThemIncreasing sales is a top priority for most businesses but, if your customers aren’t paying, extra sales won’t equate to higher revenue. When your cash flow is disrupted due to missed or late payments, it can have a significant impact on your operations. For some businesses, irregular cash flow can cause operations to come to a standstill, which could be devastating to your firm.

To prevent this from happening, take a look at these four tips to handle non-paying customers:

Take a Deposit

When customers are required to pay a deposit upfront, you can ensure that you’ve received at least partial payment before undertaking any work. This may cover the cost of materials or labor, for example, which means you won’t actually make a loss if a subsequent payment is missed.

Additionally, insisting on a deposit also gives you an opportunity to see how efficiently the customer processes their payments. This gives you an insight into whether they’re to continue making regular payments on time and can help you to gauge your future business relationship.

Highlight Payment Terms

If you’re accepting a new customer, make sure that payment terms are clearly defined and agreed in advance. Instead of relying on verbal confirmation, always ensure that agreements are made in writing. Similarly, include detailed clauses regarding when and how payments should be made so that there’s no risk of miscommunication or confusion.
Making payment terms highly visible, such as using a different font or placing the text in bold, will help to draw the recipient’s attention to them and can help to ensure payments are made speedily.

Outsource Collections

Businesses can spend a disproportionate amount of time chasing missing or late payments, which can affect their efficiency and productivity. By outsourcing to a collection agency, however, you can focus on your core business activities instead of chasing customers. As well as freeing up more of your time, using a dedicated agency can have other advantages too.

When customers receive correspondence from a collection agency, they’re more likely to take the matter seriously. As a result, payments are made more quickly, and your cash flow is reinstated.

Automate Your Invoicing

If you don’t send invoices as soon as work is complete, payments will inevitably be delayed. Even if the customer pays within the agreed timeframe, a delayed invoice can affect your cash flow and lead to unnecessary financial difficulties for your firm.

Fortunately, this is relatively easy to rectify. By implementing automated invoicing processes, you can reduce the amount of time it takes to bill customers and ensure that invoices are always sent as soon as work is completed, or products have been dispatched.

Maintaining Regular Cash Flow

The revenue that comes into your business is used to fund continued operations, which means it’s vital to your ongoing success. If you can’t pay your own suppliers or staff, it’s going to damage your professional reputation and harm your operations. By making your cash flow a top priority and ensuring invoices are paid on time, however, you can ensure that your business benefits from consistent incoming revenue.

Finding Out What People Really Think Of Your Products And Services

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |User Experience|Finding Out What People Really Think Of Your Products And ServicesTo ensure you provide an excellent website experience, you need to find out what an actual real-life user’s experience is of your website, product, or service, and so on.

One way of doing this – and don’t forget, this will change from one project to another – is to interview real-life users in real-life situations.

This means getting a group of people and asking them for their opinion on your product, whilst they are actually using it. This information can be invaluable for a content marketing agency or a person in charge of your digital marketing efforts.

Sounds a tough call and it can be, which is why many companies employ people who are specialists in what is known as UX interviews. Be aware though that not everyone who puts this on their CV is a specialist of this kind. It takes more than a cup of tea and a biscuit to understand, process, and collect this kind of data from people.

For a start, you need to find customers who are willing to have their user experience measured and quantified. Projects of this kind can work in all kinds of ways. Individual interviews are commonly used where the information the business wants is particularly detailed and thorough.

Focus groups are important and can be run along pre-determined lines. For example, the groups may be determined by age or another indicator such as level of experience in using a product and so on.

How the information is gathered is important too. Brainstorming sessions, user interviews, as a group or individually, and asking people to complete a questionnaire are all common features of UX projects.

Many of these kinds of interviews are based on observation too. As a result, the person doing the observing of users and customers needs to have a heightened awareness of their own thoughts and opinions.

Our own judgments invariably color how we see things and when we observe someone struggling to check out online, rather than thinking this may be a design fault, we may assume it is because their computer skills are pretty low.

Take a look at some of the things that make for a great set of user interviews:

  • You need to be genuine and interested in what your customers are saying – Don’t be defensive.
  • You need to adapt to each and every user – For example, if they have stopped talking, are they thinking, or have they finished what they have said?
  • Be aware of how the customer is interacting with you – Are they telling you what they think you want to hear, rather than being honest?
  • Makes sure the customer is providing their opinion – Did they find it difficult to use your website for example? You don’t want to know if their mom does…
  • Some people will censor their own views – They might say it is a ‘complicated website to use, but for others, it’ll be fine.’ It’s never fine if they found the website difficult to use.
  • You want to know the problems, not the solutions
  • Always dig deeper – For this, you need to ask the ‘why?’ question.
  • Your observations must be objective
  • Let people speak spontaneously

4 Common Customer Service Problems – And How to Fix Them

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Customer Service|4 Common Customer Service Problems – And How to Fix ThemNo matter what kind of business you run or how many years of operation you have behind you, how you engage with customers can be the difference between running a successful brand and falling at the first hurdle. Excellent customer service is critical for keeping your audience on board and satisfied with your services, so to ensure you and your team are putting in 110% effort, here are some of the common customer service problems and what you can do to solve them.

Long Response Times

Many of us live busier lives than ever before, meaning customers simply don’t have the time or patience to wait for an answer. Whether they have a problem with a particular product of yours or need clarification on a matter, the longer they’re waiting for a response, the more agitated they will become. Thankfully, there are several things you can do to ensure the customer isn’t waiting too long, such as having enough members of your team to address queries whether it’s by phone, email, or social media, as well as devising pre-packaged answers to the most commonly asked questions which may help the customer. There are call center software providers like https://www.aceyus.com/call-center-analytics you can use to speed up the response time and track the customer journey from start to finish.

Not Listening to the Customer

When dealing with a customer, it’s vital that you listen to everything they say so they feel valued and appreciated. If you fail to listen, you won’t know what your customer needs which can make the situation worse. No matter what, make sure you have thoroughly understood the issue your customer has come to you with, and double-check the problem if necessary.

Customers appreciate honesty, so if you don’t have a solution straight away, it’s better to tell them rather than not giving any answer at all.

Transferring the Customer to Multiple Departments

Many of us can count on several hands the number of times we’ve been transferred to multiple departments across a company before getting to the right person. Not only can this be time-consuming, but the situation can also be incredibly frustrating. If you must transfer the customer to another member of staff, make sure you give the customer a reason for doing so and explain the present situation in detail, so they know where they stand.

Bad Attitude toward Customers

We will inevitably have down days from time to time. However, no matter how you’re feeling or what is going on in your personal life, anyone engaging with customers should always remain professional and attentive from start to finish. First impressions count, so if a team member is displaying a poor attitude to customers, this can put your business in a bad light. Regular training is critical for all employees, helping them to understand the code of conduct in your organization, what is expected of them when dealing with customers and brushing up on their communication skills and time management.

Whether you’re about to launch a startup or already run a business, understanding the common customer service problems and what tactics to employ to solve the issue will make sure your customers are always put first.

Inexpensive Ways to Engage Your Clients in 2021

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Customer Engagement| Inexpensive Ways to Engage Your Clients in 2021Thanks to the technology available nowadays, engaging them has never been easier or more affordable.

When done right, your engagement strategy will result in a customer-focused business which will, in turn, boost more growth and loyalty.

Follow these steps and learn all you need to know about inexpensive ways to engage your customers!

Ask for Feedback

Feedback is an absolute must for every customer engagement strategy.

Your clients want to be asked about their experience with your business. It makes them feel valued.

By asking and responding to feedback, you show them their opinions matter. People need to feel heard and valued in order to be motivated and open to collaboration.

When your customers can freely express themselves, they will also want to communicate and engage with your business.

Feedback also develops emotional connections.

When your customer realizes they are not dealing with a faceless corporation but a real person behind it, it is the foundation for developing a stronger relationship.

Once you accomplish that, it will lead to more loyalty and more customer engagement.

You should create a feedback strategy that is sustainable for your business. Don’t be afraid to redefine it and try different approaches.

For example, you can include surveys, net promoter scores and social media monitoring. None of this requires spending too many resources or developing an extensive strategy.

Asking for feedback is one of your most important methods of motivating consumers to engage with your brand.

Engage Across Social Media Channels

Make sure you use multiple social media channels to communicate with your customers.

Being reachable and responsive across social media channels shows that you are ready to assist your customers at any given time.

Using your social media accounts will not only help you stay on top of trends, but also enable you to nurture your relationship with your customers on a daily basis.

You are there for them if they have any questions or concerns. Your customers will recognize the value of that.

When you create an online community on your social media, you engage your users to get more insight and information.

It is a cheap and effective way to present any news, products and quality content. Interesting and engaging information you provide on social media will keep the communication going.

When one person shares your post, you can reach hundreds of people at virtually no cost.

Even when you invest in a social media campaign that produces tons of shares and generates more views, you are still gaining more publicity than with many other, more traditional strategies.

Social media channels will help you build a reputation of being responsive and engaged with your customers at all times.

Host Webinars

You need to embrace the opportunities that come with 2021 — and one of them is hosting webinars!

With interesting webinars, you are keeping your attendees engaged from start to finish.

If the audience is invested and attentive, your customers will be open to learning more about your business and feel like a part of your community.

By making sure your webinar is informative and interesting, you will leave a strong impact and achieve better conversion rates.

Engaging webinars or seminars deliver more value to the audience.

When your customer leaves a webinar with a positive experience, his or her satisfaction will result in their loyalty to your business.

Maybe you can cover a topic that you notice your customers struggle with often.

These events don’t have to be long or expensive, but your customers will appreciate all the effort you put in and the advice you provide.

With the right webinar strategy, your webinars will be a valuable tool both for you and your customers.

Build a Loyalty Program

You absolutely need a loyalty program for your customers.

Your primary motive is to make your existing customers feel valued.

When they feel like you are willing to go that extra mile for them, they will have the motivation to continue buying from you.

This will not only elevate the customers’ appreciation of your product or service, but increase the chances that your customers share their experience with others.

Loyalty programs will also increase your revenue.

Loyal customers already have trust in your brand. When you increase customer retention, it will also increase the profit. Your customers are likely to spend more.

It is estimated that loyalty members spend 5 to 20% more than non-members on average. They also buy more frequently. This is a win-win situation for both sides.

Loyalty programs are an important part of customer experience and engagement, especially on a highly competitive market.

Conclusion

Customer engagement comprises all interactions with your customers, including feedback, social media channels, and webinars.

By following these steps and shifting your focus to loyalty programs and other engagement strategies, the interaction stays positive.

When you create your strategy around those interactions, you will help your existing customers — and bring in some new ones, too!


About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Joe PetersJoe Peters is a Baltimore-based freelance writer and an ultimate techie. When he is not working his magic as a marketing consultant, this incurable tech junkie devours the news on the latest gadgets and binge-watches his favorite TV shows. Follow him on @bmorepeters

The Feeling Economy and Customer Empathy

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Artificial Intelligence|The Feeling Economy and Customer EmpathyArtificial intelligence (AI) and automation as a workforce disruptor is a genie out of the bottle. The Brookings Institute, a little more than a year ago projected about 25% disruption of the U.S. workforce – about 36 million jobs – in the coming decades. But at the same time, the needle also is moving on A.I.’s transformation of how businesses and their customers interact.

To give this collective shift more context, AI has moved from replacing jobs associated with inspecting equipment, manufacturing goods, repairing things to replacing humans in thinking tasks–the likes of data dives and calculations. The shift originated in the Industrial Revolution and gave rise to the current “Thinking Economy.” Just as the industrial revolution automated physical tasks by decreasing the value of human strength and increasing the value of human cognition, AI taking over thinking tasks is further reshaping the landscape and ushering in a “Feeling Economy.”

AI in this Feeling Economy is doing more of the ‘brain’ work. Subsequently, humans increasingly are handling the ‘heart’ work, including social interaction, emotion recognition, nuanced communication and genuine care for customers. In the workplace, the feeling tasks of jobs – communicating with co-workers and clients, selling to or persuading others, and building and maintaining interpersonal relationships – are more important than the thinking tasks of jobs.

The rapid proliferation of “thinking AI” also is significantly transforming the goods and services marketplace. The consumer interface to the business often is AI-driven.

Online-connected consumers with smartphones can tap digital assistants — from Apple’s Siri, to Google Assistant, to Amazon’s Alexa, Samsung’s Bixby, and Microsoft’s Cortana — to answer questions, order supplies and control home electronics among other capabilities, some of which have not even been thought of yet. As time goes by, as digital assistants become more understanding of such things as context and can do a better job of personalization. GPS navigation systems, such as Waze and Google Maps, simplify the difficult navigation task of finding destinations, even if the consumer has never been to those destinations before.

The machine-to-machine transactions — consumers purchasing via the likes of Amazon Prime through Amazon’s website or app, for example — leaves the emotional connection largely to humans. To match the emotionality of the consumer, the customer-facing personnel must become more empathetic, which in turn makes the consumer even more emotionally driven – requiring greater feeling intelligence on the part of the business.

Further consider the case of the customer service representative, whose easy, repetitive tasks like providing information and making appointments are being taken over by A.I. In this context, a consumer with a non-routine problem is much more likely to be emotionally involved, and the service person to whom AI escalates the problem will need to be much more empathetic than the traditional customer service person. The emotionality of the consumer forms a feedback loop: the consumer is more emotional, so the business must become more emotional, which makes the consumer even more emotional, and so on.

In our new book, The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy, we describe a real-life scenario reflecting the thinking-to-feeling transition happening in customer service:

A recent doctoral graduate, an African-American man named Jared, was trying to buy a car. He started out with one salesperson, who took a more thinking-oriented approach. This was a good match for Jared, because PhDs are among the most thinking-oriented people on Earth. The salesperson, being good at his job, was trying to match Jared’s interaction preferences. Unfortunately, Jared was then passed off to an African American salesperson, no doubt to try to match Jared’s cultural background and ethnicity. This salesperson, knowing that business needs to be more emotional as time goes by, tried an emotional approach with Jared, calling him “my Black brother,” and using other emotional appeals. Such an approach will work the vast majority of the time as consumers become more emotionally driven. For Jared, though, it was not what he needed. The one thing we know, however, is that there will be fewer and fewer thinking-oriented consumers like Jared.

As thinking AI is making consumers more feeling-oriented—from their product expectations to their everyday life—companies can take advantage of this trend by tailoring sales, marketing and service to meet the needs of these increasingly emotionally-driven buyers.


About the Authors

Roland T. Rust is Distinguished University Professor, David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing, and founder and Executive Director of the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. An award-winning scholar, he has edited several major journals and consulted with American Airlines, AT&T, Dupont, Eli Lilly, FedEx, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, NASA, and Sony, among many companies worldwide. Ming-Hui Huang is Distinguished Professor in the College of Management at National Taiwan University. A Fellow of the European Marketing Academy, she also is International Research Fellow of the Centre for Corporate Reputation at the University of Oxford, UK, Distinguished Research Fellow of the Center for Excellence in Service at Maryland Smith and incoming Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Service Research. Their book, The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy (Springer International Publishing; January 2021), can be found at https://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Economy-Artificial-Intelligence-Creating/dp/3030529762.