Category: Customer Service

    Are you Focused on your Customers?

    On today’s episode of Solopreneur Success Strategies, it is all about the customer. Are you focused on your current customers?  Developing your customer retention rate can increase your bottom line easily. If you focus on your current customers rather than trying to get new customers ever day, you can recommend or upsell new products or services to your current customers.

    It is 10X harder to acquire a new customer than to sell new products or services to your existing customers.  Connect and follow up with your current customers to make sure they are happy with your customer service or there are ways to improve your customer service.

    By spending more time on your current customers, you can increase your profits without extra advertising.

    For more on customer acquistion and retention, join The Business of At Home Business community at http://boahbtips.com/members. 

    Categories: Customer Engagement, Customer Service Tags: Tags: ,

    Good Customer Service could keep your Customers loving you!

    In today’s world of smartphones and social media, companies have to be aware that good customer service is critical. 

    When United Airlines created a social media storm about removing a passenger this week– 

    A man was forcibly removed from a United Airlines flight from Chicago to Louisville, Ky., on Sunday, after the flight was overbooked and the passenger refused to adhere to the airline’s decision to randomly remove four passengers. by United Airlines forcibly removes passenger from overbooked flight

    United Airlines stock plunged during the week and it has lawsuits pending due to the incident. 

    Make me Feel Important

    Mary Kay Ash of Mary Kay Cosmetics said about customer service once, “Imagine that every customer is holding up a sign that says, Make me feel important.“ When you get that this is all a customer wants, you can create a customer friendly environment. 

    Love_your_Customer_Service_LM4RkX

    According to The US Department of Commerce, the main reason customers leave a business, after poor product quality, is due to poor customer service.

    That says it all.

    The truth is, every customer is always at risk of leaving you. It’s like a middle school romance. Any little thing can cause you to break up.

    What are a few steps to stop your customer from leaving you?

    • Apologize

      • Even if you don’t think it’s your company’s fault, it’s important to apologize to the client anyway.  “I’m so sorry you feel this way,” is a good way to apologize without taking the blame. However, if it was truly your fault, own up to it and apologize profusely.

     

    • Empathize

      • Put yourself in their shoes. Try stating, “I certainly understand; that would upset me too.” Then, move on toward getting answers that can help you solve the customer’s complaint to their satisfaction. You can empathize without being emotional. While it is personal to them, or they would not be irate, this is business and you should not take anything they say personally.

     

    • Listen

      • Even if you’re reading a complaint rather than listening on the telephone, take special care to really hear what the customer is saying between the negative words. If you have to, cut and paste what they are saying in a separate document, add in appropriate spaces, take out curse words, and find out what is really the issue by eliminating the extraneous information. If you need to, escalate the issue and call the customer. Phones can be very humanizing.

     

    • Start Small

      • Once you’ve determined the root problems, take small steps toward rectifying the problems one at a time. If you have to, ask the customer what you can do to make it better.  If it’s possible to solve the problem in the manner the customer desires, do it. If not, offer to meet in the middle.

     

    • Draw the Line 

      • Know when to give up. Yes, there are times with some customers that it’s better to simply give up. If you’ve done all the things that you can above, and they’re still irate and have not calmed down, it’s time to consider letting the customer go. Not every customer is going to fit with your vision and that is okay. Calmly return their money, and send them on their way.

    Click here to get book

    Providing Excellent Customer Service to Increase Sales by Jane Gardner on Scribd

    Categories: Customer Service Tags: Tags: , , , ,

    How to Turn Your Best Customers into Your Biggest Assets

    Most consumers trust their friends, family, influencers and experts to make recommendations about products and services to them. In addition, there are many ways to make recommendations – from online testimonials, to affiliate links, to direct mentions from the customer. They all work to some degree.

    To encourage your customers to provide referrals, you can take some steps in advance that set everything up to turn your best customers into your biggest assets.

    1. Be Excellent – The better you do your job, the more pride with which your customers can recommend you to others. If you provide excellent products and services, your customers will be happy to provide referrals when asked to do so.

    2. Ask Customers to Refer You – Just ask your customers to please offer referrals to their friends and family who need your products or services. Give them some literature and information about your offerings so that they can easily share.

    3. Create an Active Online Community – Using either a message board, forum, or private Facebook group, creating an online community can help spread the word of your good services and products fast to those who have need of them.

    4. Build a Long-Term Relationship – Focus on relationship building over the long term and you will create true raving fans that are eager to recommend your business. When you have a real relationship with someone, they’re that much more likely to tell others about you.

    5. Create a Formal Referral Program – Offer discounts to friends and family recommended by customers, along with a coupon to the one who gave the referral. With a formal referral program you should let every customer know about it as soon as they become full customers.

    6. Use Social Media Strategically – Offer a coupon code for consumers “liking” or “following” your brand on social media, and encourage them to share. Offering sign-up incentives for newsletters and more always helps get the word out about your services.

    7. Market Your Testimonials – When someone gives you a raving testimonial, turn it into a meme, ask for a recording, put it into many formats and then publish it and market it across all channels. Market your testimonials as you could other types of content.

    8. Follow Up – Always follow up with customers who have provided referrals to you by offering them a discount, a thank you note, and acknowledgement. The more you follow up after a positive referral, the more likely they will to continue doing it.

    Word-of-mouth referrals are over 50 percent more effective than other forms of marketing. If you want to develop a long-term business, the best way to ensure that it really is a long-term business is to encourage word-of-mouth marketing in every way that you can.

    Many business owners find after years of being in business that most of their customers come from word-of-mouth, which lessens the need to expend more time, money and effort on other forms of marketing.

    Categories: Customer Service, Grow a Home Business Tags: Tags:

    Ten Things You Can Learn from Customer Feedback

    Whether it’s compliments or complaints, you can learn a lot from customer feedback. If you pay close attention to it, you’ll figure out what is working and what is not working for your customers. You may also identify gaps in your products or services that you can correct. You’ll find out:

    1. If the Buying Process Works – If you find that you are getting a lot of abandoned carts, as well as emails asking how to do things or find something on your website, it’s a sign that the process isn’t working. You then need to revamp it according the customers’ feedback.

    2. How Well Your Website Communicates – Your website likely has a FAQ that is designed to answer questions before they contact you for information. If you’re getting the same question asked that is in the FAQ a lot, you may need to fix the keywords used or the headline so that your customers can better find the answer.

    3. Whether Your Shopping Cart Works or Not – If people want to buy what you’re selling and they can’t due to a faulty shopping cart system, they will contact you. Listen closely to their experiences so that you can get it fixed fast.

    4. If Your Sales Pages Convert – If you have a lot of hits on your sales pages but not a lot of sales, then you need to revamp your sales pages. Even if no one contacts you but you’re getting hits and no converts, there is a problem.

    5. If There Is a Problem with Your Product – Buyers will be faster to tell you of a problem with your product or service than if something is good. Therefore, it’s imperative to listen when they tell you about a problem even if you initially do not agree.

    6. If There Are Gaps in Products or Services – When a customer purchases a product from you, give them time to enjoy it, then send them a survey giving a couple of open-ended questions designed to find gaps that they’d like filled.

    7. How to Make a Product Better – When customers give you feedback, you can often learn how to make your product better. When a customer gives a great idea, take it for what it’s worth and improve.

    8. What You’re Doing Right – Yes, from feedback you can also learn what you’re doing right and what your customers want. You can then do more of it in order to increase your income.

    9. Help You Generate New Ideas – Every time you get feedback, whether it’s on social media or from a survey, if you read carefully your creative juices will be activated and you’ll get new ideas for new products or services.

    10. Learn New Ways to Use Your Product – Many times, customers will send feedback and tell you about a way that they are using your product that you had not considered. Knowing these new ways to use your products can help you improve your marketing efforts.

    Learning from customer feedback is an important part of doing business. One of the least expensive forms of market research that you can conduct is through the follow up. Whether you send a survey or call your customers to ask them for information about how they like your product and services, you can use what they tell you to improve your business.

    Categories: Customer Service, Grow a Home Business Tags: Tags: ,

    How to Bury Information You Don’t Want Known

    If you recently Googled yourself and found out that something shows up that you don’t want people to focus on or know about, there are a few steps you can take to bury the information. Depending on how active the people spreading the information are will affect your success, but if you work hard you can bury the negativity. Here’s how.

    Set Up Publically Viewed Profiles on Social Media

    The more public profiles and active social media accounts you can maintain that have positive information about you, the lower down the search results you’ll push any negativity. The key here is that each profile must be public, mention your company, your name or both, and the products and services that the negative information is about. If you can identify the keywords that resulted in the negative results, try to include them too.

    Engage Publically on Forums, Articles, Blog Posts, and Social Media

    Making positive and helpful comments online in public in your name whenever you can is an important way to negate negative content that is floating around out there about you and your business. Provide well thought-out comments and posts that use good grammar, proper spelling, and that sound intelligent. It will make you look a lot more trustworthy and smarter to the public.

    Ensure That All Your Online Real-Estate Connects Together

    Within the profile confines, be sure that every one of your social media profiles link to your website and blog and when possible each other. You want a connection to be known so that everyone knows that you are really you. Then be sure to use these accounts to make comments, post useful content, and share important industry news with your followers. Everything you can do on your online accounts to increase activity will help.

    Dominate Negative Keywords

    By negative keywords we mean the keywords that bring up the negative results that you found. Write blog posts that feature these words, and turn them into a positive. If you found the negative search with specific words, use those specific words in blog posts, videos, and tags for pictures and in titles of blog posts. The more you use it in a positive manner, the lower down the search results the negative issue will be found.

    Get Some Help

    Have some other people help you conduct searches to help identify more words and negative information. Google often provides results particular to you so it’s important to get others to help. There are firms you can hire, but you can also ask your virtual assistant to do it – as well as close family and friends that you don’t mind knowing about the negative information.

    Enlist Friends and Family to Say Good Things

    Your friends and family can comment on message boards, blogs, and in social media too. Instruct them to keep everything positive at all times but to casually mention your business in their comments in a positive way. Plus, ask them to leave positive feedback on rating sites.

    Ask Affiliates and Business Partners for Testimonials

    You don’t have to tell your affiliates or business partners about the negative search results, but you can increase your efforts asking for positive testimonials from them. Ask for a testimonial on LinkedIn, your website and more. Ask them to write blog posts about you and tell them you’ll write it yourself and they can edit it. Whatever you can do to increase the good words out there about you, the better.

    Do More Interviews

    Interviews are a great way to get rid of negative search results and bury them under goodness. You can go to your business partners, affiliates and colleagues again to get interviews. If you have a virtual assistant, task them with getting you at least one interview per week to talk about a few different subjects you can let the interviewees choose from. If you don’t have one, then you’ll have to do the leg work yourself, but opening yourself up to interviews will definitely help push down the negativity.

    Pushing down negativity may take some time, but it can be done if you put an all-out effort. In fact, shouldn’t you be doing this at all times anyway? If you do, you won’t have to worry that much about one online blunder.

    Categories: Customer Service, Run a Home Business Tags: Tags:

    Expanding the Lifetime Value of Your Customer

    You probably know that each customer has a lifetime value in business. This is called the CLV, customer lifetime value. It translates into the amount that you can earn on any one customer as they enter your product funnel. Understanding your CLV can help you determine how much you should spend on marketing, and also help you determine ways to expand your CLV.

    * Become More Customer Centric – Customer service is one of the most important parts of any business. Even if you have the best products or services in the world, if your customer service is lacking you won’t last long. If you want repeat buyers, treat your customers with the importance they deserve.

    * Build Targeted Upsells – With technology like LeadPages.net you can easily create an automated system to build upselling into the buying process. For example, you can do it in the shopping cart, or you can do it through follow-up emails.

    * Create Logical Cross-Sells – A cross-sell is a just selling a different product to a current customer. It should relate to your audience, but it doesn’t have to relate to the first product that you sold them the same way an upsell does.

    * Be Responsive – It’s imperative that you set up a system that makes you seem super responsive to your customers. Whether that is a ticketing system, a 48-hour answering policy, or open office hours doesn’t matter. But, you need to be perceived as very responsive to keep your customers happy.

    * Over Deliver – Every product or service that you deliver should be better than the customer expects. The fact is, you won’t please everyone all the time, but you can shoot to over deliver. If a customer is unhappy, you can over deliver with your solution to fix their problem.

    * Create a Referral Program – Let your customers earn money or points by recommending you to other people. Often, when people can earn enough money to support their buying habits, they’ll be more likely to spend money with you. It’s a win-win all the way around.

    * Stay Connected – Find ways to stay connected with your audience, such as social media, email, teleseminars, and webinars. The more ways they can connect with you, the happier they’re going to be and the more your CLV will expand.

    * Develop an Inner Circle – One way to expand your CLV is to provide a fee-based inner circle that certain customers can join. It can be on a private forum or even be run by Facebook. You can use a private Facebook group or create your own forum with native software.

    Nothing is more important in your business than your customers. The more you can study what they need and find a way to deliver it to them, the longer they’ll stick with you. But, you have to keep creating products to keep those who’ve bought from you interested and wanting more. You also have to deliver exceptional service and quality so they get past the first product in your funnel.

    Categories: Customer Acquistion, Customer Engagement, Customer Service, Email Subscribers Tags: Tags: