One of the main elements of a good business and a good service is keeping the customers happy. If your customers are unhappy then your business won’t be good and the only option will be shutting it down or trying to fix relationship with your customers. Don’t let that happen to you!
To fully realize how to make your customers happy you have to understand them first. You have to get to know your customers and learn about their needs and what they want. When you realize that you will be able to fulfill everything they need and even more. To perfectly understand your customers you have to do three things: analyze different data and information about customers’ behavior, put yourself into their shoes and ask them about their opinion.
- Data analysis
Your CRM (customer relationship management system) will gather a lot of information for you. With that information you will be able to inform yourself about your customers and understand the way they behave and therefore realize what their needs are. CRM systems are a very powerful tool for controlling your customers because they contain every information about the behavior of customers and with that you will be able to improve satisfaction with customers.
- Filling customers shoes
Imagine yourself as a customer. It may sound like a weird strategy but it will work. Try to think about your response time. Is it fast enough? Would you wait that much for a response from some company? If you don’t fulfill your promises and return calls very slow then you are very likely to lose customers. If you own some small business always try to remember some personal information about customers you meet like their names or some parts of conversation you had with them in the past. That will surely put them in better mood and make them talk about you with their friends.
- Simple questions
You can learn what you are doing wrong in your customer service just by asking them about it. Don’t go from a customer to customer and ask everyone some question individually. Make a survey with the most important questions and ask your customers to fill it. Keep it short and simple. With a survey your customers will feel important because their opinion will matter to you. And if you get some feedback about something you should change then do it and inform customers about it.
Benefits of good customer service
If you are not doing everything I mentioned above then your customer service is probably not so good and you are missing a lot of things. A good customer service can give you a lot of good stuff. The biggest benefits are:
- Better investments – if you have some investors into your business then a good feedback from customers will surely make them invest more and more to you and your company. And with that your company will surely grow.
- Better marketing – when you have a good customer service and your product or service is very good then people will surely talk about it. They can talk about it directly with people, mention you in e-mail or publish something about you on social media networks. Any of that things will lead to bigger popularity with larger audience.
- Business growth – a great service will lead to the growth of a complete business. Because of a good publicity more clients will come to search for your product or service.
- Better strategy – when you learn about your customers’ behaviors and expectations you will be able to adapt your business strategy to those expectations and make it more effective.
- Less chance for failure – when you have a good customer service and understand what your customer expect then the change for a failure of your business is a lot lower.
- Motivation of employees – your employees will be a lot more motivated if the customers are happy. Happy customers means that the pressure of improving is much less and that the finances are mostly very good so employees will feel comfortable working for you.
- Overall efficiency – all of the benefits above will help the whole business organization. When you combine all of that you can realize that the whole productivity of your business is increased.
Keeping customers happy
So, now you know how to understand your customers and what you get from making them happy it is time to actually make them happy. Some studies say that you need about five times more money to get some new customers than to keep the ones you already have so you have to take care of that. But how to do that? Follow advices below and your business will be favorite with every customer you have.
- Communication
Everything is much easier if you communicate enough. Send emails to customers, send them messages on social media networks or even call them and ask them are they happy with their services and how are they feeling. Ask them about their personal opinions about your service and what you should change or add.
- Content, product or service
If you create a quality content or offer quality service or good product your customers will be happy. Simple enough. When you create high quality stuff it will show that you are better than your competition. That will lead to improving your brand identity and some clients will maybe share your content or recommend service or product to other people.
- Beat the competition
Research the field you are working in a lot, find out stuff about competition and aim to be best. If people realize that you are the best business in some specific industry then they will stick to you, use your products and probably be happy.
- Fast response
When someone sends you a message or email make sure to answer within 24 hours or even sooner. And try to make that automatic response that automatically answers that you received their message and will reply soon because that is better than making customers wait.
- Make good decisions
Be confident and sure in your decisions! And when you communicate with customers avoid being unsure because you won’t seem confident and customers won’t trust you.
- Respect other opinions
When you get some feedback from your customers always listen to them and respect their opinion even if you don’t like it. They are your customers and they have the right to be unhappy with something. Listen to what they got to say, realize their needs and try to customize your service to fit their needs.
- Be personal
When communicating with customers try to be less professional and more personal.
- Be realistic
When you make some promise to customers always make sure that you can deliver it. If you promise something huge and fail to do it your customers will be unhappy and will lose trust in you. But if you promise something smaller and succeed in doing it then customers will surely be satisfied.
- Be innovative
Always try to come up with some new ideas and new stuff that will impress your customers. Even if it is not something special it is always a good idea to ask customers what they think about it and what can you do to improve that idea and make it better.
- Be clear
And my last advice to you is to be clear about what you do. Show customers exactly who you are, what you do and what can they expect.
Customers experience facts
So, I hope you learned something. To end this article I will list few completely true facts about customer experience that will once again show you why a good customer service and keeping customers happy is so important.
- Chance for selling something to existing customer is about 60-70%. The change for selling something to a new customer is about 5-20%.
- The main reason for loss of customers is bad customer service, not the price.
- For every customer who complained about your service there are 26 other unhappy customers that didn’t say anything.
- 96% of unhappy customers won’t complain to you. 91% of those unhappy customers will leave to a competitor.
- Happy customers talk about that good experience to 4-6 people.
- Unhappy customers talk about that bad experience to 9-15 people.
- 13% of unhappy customers talk about that bad experience to more than 20 people.
- 55% of customers would pay some extra money if that would guarantee a great service.
- You have to get 12 happy customers to make up for one unhappy customer.
