Tag: Customers

The Customer Is King: How To Ensure Your Clients Feel Like VIPs

Two of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. The lifeblood of any business is its customer base. Keeping them happy is in most cases, ensuring success. The following contributed post is thus entitled, The Customer Is King: How To Ensure Your Clients Feel Like VIPs.

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If you run a business, there’s every chance you’re familiar with the old adage, ‘the customer is king.’ Sadly, while many companies strive to provide a VIP experience, not all succeed in the mission to put the customer first. If you’re eager to improve your review scores, you’d like to put more emphasis on customer service, or you’re looking to raise your game to leave the competition in your wake, here are some suggestions to ensure your clients feel like royalty.

Analyze what you’re offering
If you’re running marketing campaigns, you’re offering promotions, you’re sending out emails on a daily basis, and you’re providing new customers with incentives, it can be difficult to keep track of what you’re actually offering. Take a moment to analyze exactly what you’re providing for new and existing customers, read through your offers and adverts carefully, and make sure you can deliver on your promises. Check the small print, and ensure that clients have access to information about the terms and conditions attached to promotions and discounts. It’s also essential to realize your legal responsibilities as a business owner. If you sell products, for example, the last thing you want is to be challenged by a customer seeking legal advice about consumer claims. Your products should meet the relevant safety and quality standards, you should provide accurate descriptions, and you should have a refund policy in place. To avoid complaints and negative reviews, it’s crucial to ensure that you can fulfil promises, so take a good look at the promotions, products, and services you’re offering, verify that the information you’re providing is correct, and make sure you tick every legal box.

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Act on feedback
More and more businesses ask for feedback. Research shows that over 90% of people now read reviews before making a decision about which product to buy or which brand to choose. With reviews playing an increasingly important role in the decision-making process, it’s crucial to make use of feedback. If you’ve asked clients to provide and share comments, take the time to read and digest them, and act on them. It can be tempting to focus on positive feedback, which provides a feel-good factor, but negative comments can be even more valuable. If you know you’ve got something wrong, or you’re doing something that your customers don’t like, you can take steps to address the issue before you get any more comments. Feedback can also give you an insight into how consumers view your brand and provide you with ideas and inspiration to push your business forward.

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Don’t overlook loyal customers
Sometimes, businesses are guilty of chasing new customers so ferociously that they overlook their existing clients. As a company owner, there is nothing more valuable than a repeat customer. You’ve got a ready-made client ready and waiting to buy from you again, and that customer is also likely to recommend you to friends and family. If you’re building your client base, it’s natural to want to attract new customers, but don’t underestimate the importance of loyalty. Offer incentives for new clients, but don’t forget to reward those who have already contributed to your profits. There are lots of ways you can celebrate loyalty, from rewards cards to access to special offers or exclusive events. Remember that there’s nothing to stop your customers being lured in by introductory offers advertised by the competition.

Offer a personalized service
Even if you’re one of a million customers, it’s nice to feel special. When you run a business, and you’re focused on providing exceptional standards of customer service, it’s incredibly beneficial to add a personal touch. This could mean anything from offering a bespoke shopping service to sending out personalized emails or offers on a customer’s birthday. Instead of addressing all your customers with a generic subject line and welcome, add that customer’s name. Research shows that personalized emails have a higher conversion rate. Use your own experiences as a customer. What has impressed you, and what has put you off choosing a specific company or brand?

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Create a positive user experience
When you go shopping, you browse your inbox, or you take a look at a website, what do you look for? Many buyers are now looking for more than a simple transaction, which involves swapping cash for a product or a service. Modern consumers want to enjoy an experience, which feels new, fresh, and engaging. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes for a moment. Take a walk through your salon, store, or restaurant, spend half an hour navigating your way around your website and take a look at the emails you send out to subscribers. Make notes. Are there changes you could make to enhance the experience? Could you offer new features on your site? Is it possible to improve the aesthetic of your shop or add ambiance with music or lighting? Could you provide a more luxurious experience by offering clients at your hair or beauty salon a coffee with fancy latte art or a glass of bubbly? Try and be original, and match the changes you make to your brand and the target market.

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Provide staff training
If customer service is an essential part of your business, or this is an area in which you’re keen to make improvements, make sure your staff has the relevant training, knowledge and skills to achieve the desired outcomes. If you own a restaurant, it doesn’t matter how brilliant the food is or how spectacular the interior looks. If the waiting staff is rude, this is what the diner will remember. Training can help employees to develop confidence and to understand what exceptional customer service entails.

To make it to the top in business, you have to be able to impress both new and existing customers. Consumers aren’t happy to settle for sub-standard products or poor customer service, and as a business owner, it’s your job to make sure that your customers feel like VIPs. If you can prioritize customer service, deliver on promises, add a personal touch and provide your clients with a positive, memorable experience, this will stand you in good stead to expand your business, attract rave reviews, and hopefully reap financial rewards.

How Can You Tell If Your Customers Like You

Two of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. No matter what you business is, your customers are you lifeblood. Sales are the ultimate indicator of whether or they like your products and services, but today there other ways to gauge this. The following contributed is thus entitled, How Can You Tell If Your Customers Like You.

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Businesses need to know whether what they’re doing is the right thing. But what actually constitutes “the right thing” can be difficult to ascertain. Customers are often mysterious creatures and won’t willingly write a report on company performance.

How your company performs in the eyes of customers, though, is paramount. It’s customers who ultimately decide whether the company lives or dies and whether you end up making money in the end. If they don’t like what you’re selling, your bottom line will suffer, and you could ultimately go out of business.

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Companies need to do marketing research to find out whether customers actually like their product, but that process itself is fraught with difficulties. For starters, people are getting tired of filling out endless surveys and reviews online for products that they buy. It’s hard enough finding the products you want and ordering them, let alone writing an in-depth article about their features and how they measured up (although some people do this).

Customers want easier options when it comes to writing reviews, and often just want to give a star-rating out of five. But that doesn’t tend to help companies all that much who need specific feedback about the features of their products. Yes, it gives an overall impression that customers are happy, but not much more than that.

Working out whether customers like something that you do can, therefore, be a challenge. But, as a business owner or manager, there are still plenty of pieces of information that you can use to tell you whether what you’ve created is remarkable or not. Take a look at the following.

Your Customers Keep Coming Back

Okay sure, your customers don’t give you direct, detailed feedback. But if they keep on coming back for more, then it’s sure sign that you’re doing the right thing.

You can see this “coming back for more” effect playing out in some of the world’s most successful companies. Apple, for instance, has seen customers returning year after year each time it releases a new iPhone. For many years after the release of the original iPhone back in 2007, news outlets reported on how Apple was attracting queues of people at midnight for the launch of its new product. Although this has come down from the fever-pitch levels of a few years back, Apple is still riding the same wave. People just love its products and keep coming back for more.

What’s so surprising about companies like Apple is that customers don’t keep coming back because of low prices – the logic of many business leaders today. Instead, they come back because they know that they’re going to get a service that they can’t get anywhere else. Only Apple can do Apple.

In some ways, it’s almost like people can’t live without their Apple products. Life without an iPhone or Mac seems so far removed from how life should be that customers don’t even entertain the possibility of not having one of the company’s products. Regular businesses can take advantage of this idea too: they can harp on about how critical their products are to their customers’ worlds, and how living without them would be a nightmare.

The final thing that keeps customers coming back is usually the uniqueness of the product or customer experience. Obviously, if you’re an online retailer, it’s not as easy to differentiate your product as it would be if you were a product manufacturer, like Apple, but you can still focus on the customer experience elements that keep people coming back. One of the reasons Walmart has been so successful over the years has been its strategy of always welcoming customers in its stores and trying to serve them on an individual basis, even though it is going for the mass market. People will come back if they enjoy the overall experience and will weigh this against the prices on offer.

Your Customers Talk About What You Do

How can you tell that customers like Tesla Motors? Because they talk about the company of their own volition. People love the products and the ethos of the company, and they’re more than willing to spread the word about the firm’s products on Tesla’s behalf with no direction from the company itself.

Tesla is an unusual business in so many ways. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that it has hardly spent any money on marketing at all. All its spare cash has gone into expanding its production and paying off debts, and it relies almost exclusively on the work of the community to promote its products.

Companies who can delight customers so much that they go out and start spreading the word themselves always win. People are far more likely to believe the claims of their peers than they are the company, and so customer marketing is usually a lot more effective. If you can get your customers to form a community around your business and get them to spread the word about your products, then you’re likely to win big.

Keep an eye on social media sites like YouTube which have high engagement. See whether there are any opportunities for you to reach out to influencers who would be willing to make videos extolling the virtues of your products.

Happy Customers Will Tell You They Like You

It’s hard to know what silent customers are thinking. Sure, they might love your business, or they might hate it, but it’s more likely to be that they are indifferent to it. Although that’s not a disaster, it’s also not the best possible situation.

Customers who are enthralled by your products will tell you about it. Unsolicited positive feedback is a sure sign that you’re doing something right and that you’ve adopted an approach customers like. People aren’t used to receiving impeccable service from companies most of the time, and so if you can deliver, you’re likely to find out about it. Keep track of individual customer stories and see whether a pattern emerges. Ask yourself what they like and what they don’t.

Deliver The Best Deliveries For Your Customers

Two of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. For businesses that ship inventory to consumers, it’s important to be able ship your deliverables in the most efficient manner and to keep customer satisfaction high. The following contributed post is thus entitled, Deliver The Best Deliveries For Your Customers.

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Do you know what the biggest issue many customers have with businesses? It’s that they don’t offer quick enough deliveries or that they seem to overcharge for the shipment. As a result, some companies can struggle with their customer service reviews, and they might get a few more poor online reviews than they would like.

Don’t let your deliveries drag you down like this! There are ways you can up your game and improve the overall delivery and shipment processes within your company. Read on to find out more!

Make The Internal Process As Simple As Possible

One of the first things to work on is your internal delivery process. One of the main problems that many companies have with their process is that it is far more complicated than it should be. Thankfully, it can be easy to cut down and make a lot more efficient. The key to that is to try and take away as many steps from the whole process as possible. That will slim it down and make it a lot more effective.

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Train Your Warehouse Staff

You also need to offer regular training to all of your warehouse staff. As these are the employees that will be handling all orders and ensuring that they are shipped out on time, keeping them well trained will ensure their productivity. It also informs them about the best way to handle fragile goods and perishable items that might need to follow special regulations.

Consider Outsourcing Deliveries

If you find that trying to handle all of the deliveries is too much for your company, you could always outsource them. You could hand the packaged shipments to a courier service, for instance. If you sell large items, then you might need to find a flatbed trucking company. There are some businesses that also like to outsource their storage as well. Thankfully, there are some courier companies that will be able to store and ship all of your products for you for very reasonable prices.

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Be On The Ball With Your Stock Takes

If you do keep hold of your own stock, then it’s best to stay very organized with your stock takes. Ideally, you should try to carry them out at least once a week. This helps you carry out stock rotation and will reduce the chances of you ever selling out.

Ensure Customers Are Up To Date

I’m sure that all of your customers will want to be kept up to date with all the orders that they placed. In fact, it’s the not knowing part that can often result in a lot of bad reviews! So, make sure your customers always receive a tracking number and that they can use this to see every step that their item makes on its journey. At least this will give them a better idea of when they can expect their purchase to arrive!

Hopefully, all of these tips can help you improve the delivery of all orders for all of your customers!