When it comes to running a business, it is vital to take your customers into account. They decide the future of your business as much as you do, if not even more so, due to the fact that they control your cash flow by choosing you over competitors.
However, it might be shocking to know that many businesses don’t focus as much on being customer-centric as they probably should, which is costing them money. Of course, there are ways to make the business you already have a far more customer-centric one without breaking the bank, and without changing much.
It can be difficult to choose where to start building the customer-oriented sections of your business, and you might be worried that you initiate them in the wrong place. The truth is, figuring out where you want the customer helping prompts to be can actually be relatively easy, it’s just figuring out which customer services you might need and which ones you might not. Here are four ways your business could be more customer-centric and help your business earn the money it might miss out on.
#1 Use surveys to prompt customer feedback
This can be your saving grace if you don’t quite know where you’re going wrong. If your customer satisfaction rates aren’t quite as high as you’d hope they would be, or you get a lot of shopping cart abandonment, you might want to consider investing in a few surveys for your customers to answer.
The likelihood is that you will get at least some replies, and then you can cater to the majority, which can be very helpful for helping the main body of your customer base. However, it might also be good to have alternate forms of paying to help give people more choice about what they want to pay with, for example, in installments rather than in full.
#2 Ensure that your customers feel more looked after
A good way to do this is to ensure that they feel like they can communicate with your team every time they visit your site. Using a service such as welcome messages can be a great way to help your business become more customer-centric. Not only does it prompt an interaction, but it can also be informative and give more support if customers can’t find what they are looking for or need more information.
There are many examples of how using a welcoming message chatbot might be beneficial to your business and your customer service rankings and can be really useful if you don’t have enough people on your frontline support to deal with the number of questions. This might be especially helpful if you have suddenly taken on a large number of new customers or your employees are feeling a little worn thin.
#3 Choose a relational or transactional service model and stick to it
This is a big decision to make when it comes to running your business and what kind of customer support you will need. A transactional service model focuses more on the sale: your customer service will be all about directing people to their direct purchase and will often be concise and to the point. It will definitely feel like people are being pushed to buy something rather than to build a relationship with them. Its goal will be to make a transaction happen, and that is it.
A relational service, as you can probably imagine, is something far more personal. It will often encourage its customers to view the whole site and return after their purchase and will often give them a good, human feel to the business. It can make people feel welcome and give a good customer experience. However, it can also make people feel a little bothered, so you need to be careful when using this. A relational service will encourage customers to come back and recommend the customer service and the brand, whereas a transactional business model will be actively based around making a sale and a sale alone.
Both of these models have their upsides and downsides, and it all depends on how you want your business to be run to be able to get the right service model for you.
#4 Interact with your customers more.
This doesn’t mean spam their email; instead it means to take to social media and interact with your business’s community. Run competitions that are centered around your business, look into social media influencer marketing to see if it would be a good choice for you to invest in, make big announcements, and reply to messages and posts that your business has been tagged in. All of these things, no matter how small they might be, can make all the difference.
Not only will it give your business publicity, but it will also help your business to overcome a lot of hurdles that your customers might put up. Not only this, but it can also help you interact with past customers and helps people become more trusting in your business. This can be a great way to help your business’s online presence and help them become well known in tagged circles, which can all be a great way of making more money and increasing customer satisfaction rates.
In conclusion
To conclude, it can be tricky to know where your customer service slips up, especially if you feel that you need it to be better and you are missing out on sales. A good way to do this is to give your customers a good chance to express their experiences and opinions through a survey at the end of their purchase.
You might also want to help guide them through the purchasing and browsing process through the use of a welcome message chatbot. You might want to reconsider your business’s service model, or you might just feel that you should interact with your customers more outside of the business’s website. There are many ways to make your business more customer central, but you need to find the best methods for you and your business.
