Tag: customer

    How and When to End Your Business Relationship

    When it comes to being a service provider, sometimes it becomes necessary to end a business relationship. It doesn’t necessarily mean that something is wrong with the person as a human being, but it may mean that you’ve both outgrown each other. Or some other reason may have arisen that causes you to want to end the relationship.

    Reasons to End a Client Relationship

    * You’re Suffering from Scope Creep – When you started with the client, you had well-defined responsibilities which you’ve allowed to get out of control. You’re now doing work far outside of your niche and you don’t enjoy it. You’re not being paid enough to outsource, and you’re starting to feel resentful.

    * They Make Unreasonable Demands – Remember that what is unreasonable to you is reasonable to them, so it’s best not to confront them on this behavior but rather try to set limits. If you try to set limits and they won’t let you, it may be time to end the relationship because you are a bad fit.

    * They Keep Trying to Make You Reduce Your Rates – Anyone who agrees on a rate, then keeps trying to talk you down, doesn’t respect your business. They may even think of you as an employee or a liability instead of a partner in their business, which may cause them to feel resentful of paying you at all. If the issue of pay comes up a lot, it may be a good idea to move on.

    * They Are Slow Payers – Any client who won’t pay on time on a consistent basis is a liability to your business and your cash flow. As a service provider, you need to get paid for the work you do on time. If you have an agreement to get paid in a certain way, you should get paid. Give your client a warning and set a three strikes and you’re out rule.

    * They Don’t Listen – When a client hires you as an expert in your niche but they will not listen to anything you have to contribute, yet they still want you to be responsible for ROI, you have a serious problem that has to be fixed. If you cannot fix it, let them go.

    * They Are Unresponsive – If you ask for information and they won’t ever give it to you or are often late with the information, and it affects how you perform your duties, it may be best to let the client go. Their unresponsiveness can ruin your schedule and affect not only the work you do for them but also the work you do for others.

    * They Are Disrespectful – You know when someone shows you contempt or disrespect. You are a business owner now and you don’t need to put up with any of that. When you feel as if someone is disrespecting you, ask them if they’re saying what you think they are saying so that they can clarify. If they are being disrespectful, it’s time to part ways.

    The Best Ways to End the Client Relationship

    * Look at Your Contract – Check the contract to see what the rules and methods of ending the relationship are and stick to that.

    * Keep It Business Related – Even though sometimes ending a client relationship feels personal, it’s best if you don’t get personal but keep it all business. Only address business things in your notice. Don’t get personal. If you must be vague rather than detailed to keep it professional, do that.

    * Give Notice – In most cases it’s best to give notice according to the contract. In most cases you can safely give a month’s notice, which is longer than a typical employee relationship because it may take them time to find a replacement. But, if the relationship is contentious you may try to end it sooner.

    * Refund Money – If you work on a retainer, be sure to refund any part of the money you’ve not yet earned. Even if your contract says you will not offer refunds, it’s better to do that as you’ll leave on a higher note.

    Ending a relationship is never easy, but once you do let go of clients who aren’t ideal, you’re going to free up space to attract your ideal clients. Plus, once it’s over you’re going to feel so much better about your business and yourself.

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

    Overall Customer Experience Optimization

    Today, brands have to go a lot further to please their customers than in the past. The experience of each and every customer is important to the point of brands having to consider the experience of one user over the masses. After all, you want each customer to come away with a relevant experience that they want to tell others about.

    How a customer experiences your brand has a lot to do with various aspects of your offerings and at what level they entered your product funnel. You want each customer to feel that you thought of them throughout their entire journey regardless of where they entered, in a way that differentiates you from the competition.

    1. Know Your Customer – You hear it all the time, and you’re likely tired of it; but the fact is, if you don’t know who your customer is and what they stand for, you’ll have a hard time creating products, services, information or platforms that resonate with them.

    2. Talk Their Language – If you want to be relevant to your customer then you need to speak their language. Spend time in communities with your customer to find out how they speak to each other so that you can comfortably talk to them the way they talk to each other.

    3. Be True to Your Brand – Know your voice, and which images evoke the feelings that you want your customer to feel. If you remember to tell your story with the focus on the customer, you can both be true to your brand and your customer.

    4. Deliver Enormous Value – In order to truly improve your customers’ experience, deliver the best value you can afford to deliver. Under promise and over deliver for every product or service you create for your audience, every single time. If your sales pages promise the moon, make sure to include the stars too.

    5. Make It Timely – You want to be sure to deliver the right product at the right time. This happens with continuous research into what your audience wants, needs, and expects, as well as a good understanding of the technology available to you to make delivery better.

    6. Provide Options – Most consumers today like having options. If you can provide your customer with different options including delivery methods, formats, and price points, you’ll have much happier customers.

    7. Let Your Customers See You – Let your customers in on who you are, and what your voice is and what you stand for. If they can get to know you and feel as if they know you, you can build an entire community of fans waiting to buy your next product.

    8. Ask for Feedback – Don’t skimp on getting feedback from current customers at every stage of the buying process. The more you ask, the more answers you’ll get, and the better your presentation and product can become.

    Poor customer experience is a main factor in lack of repeat purchases among previous customers. Even if your product delivered what you said it would, if getting it was difficult, or navigating your website was hard, they’re not likely to want to do it again. It’s up to you to ensure that each customer’s experience is optimized from end to end in order to maximize potential earnings – because getting a new customer costs a lot more than keeping the ones you have.

    Categories: Customer Engagement Tags: Tags:

    How to Identify Your Ideal Customer

    The fact is about 20 percent of all your customers will generate 80 percent of your income. That is because the other 80 percent aren’t totally in line with your ideal customer. There is a way to improve your income exponentially, and that’s by hyper focusing on your ideal customer so that you can attract more ideal customers and fewer who aren’t ideal.

    1. What Benefits Does Your Product or Service Offer? – Make a list of all the benefits that your product or service has. When you are thinking like your customer, you will always think about “what’s in it for me?” Your customer wants to know why they should use that product.

    2. Identify Pain Points That You Can Solve – What sort of pain points does your product or service solve? Does it free up time? Does it end boredom?

    3. Determine Who Needs These Issues Solved – Once you’ve gathered a list of benefits your product offers and pain points that your product solves, you need to figure out who needs those benefits and has those pain points.

    4. Determine Your Customers’ Potential Characteristics – Once you have a list of those who might benefit from your product or service, you can make a list of demographics and other factors that people in that group share.

    5. Determine Your Customers’ Behavior – Find ways to research the list of people you made above so that you can get a better idea of the type of behavior your target audience displays.

    6. What Career Does Your Ideal Customer Have? – Can you determine what type of career your ideal client has from the information you’ve gathered above?

    7. What Price Point Can They Afford? – Once you know what type of career your ideal client has, you can also determine a fair price point for your product or service based on what they can afford to pay and the value of your offering.

    8. Test Your Assumptions – Once you have a fair idea of who your ideal client is, you can test your assumptions by identifying some influencers within your audience and asking them to try your product or service.

    9. Repeat – Take the answers you get from the information above and the test and improve upon your offerings so that you can truly please your ideal customer.

    Using the information learned from all of the above actions, you can truly focus your marketing efforts toward your ideal client. In addition, you can use the information to retain the right customers in order to take advantage of repeat customers and a high level of customer satisfaction.

    Categories: Ideal Customer 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:

    There are 3 Billion People online-Your Tribe is out there!

    multi ethnic hands reaching for globe ball

    There are 3,279,088,431 people on the internet today!
    Tweet: There are 3,279,088,431 people on the internet today!

    Your message
    Your product
    Your service
    Your passion will serve those who need or want you to help them solve a problem or fulfill a need.
    Don’t be intimidated by the idea of reaching EVERYONE!
    You aren’t in the Everyone Business , according to Darren Scott Monroe.

    There are 3 Billion Online and your TRIBE, your AUDIENCE, your CUSTOMERS will find you if you message is clear and you go to where THEY are.

    How do you find your Customers?

    Define who your Customers are and this will tell you where they like to hangout on the Internet (or whether they don’t come onto the internet).


    Categories: Ideal Customer Tags: Tags: ,

    5 Helpful Tips For customer service

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    In the 20th century, customer service was based on contact one on one with the customer and market research with focus groups. Now, as more people spend hours online shopping or browsing for more information on products or services, there is more research available.

    When a customer goes onto a website and there is implicit consent that even with a privacy policy, the website can collect data on how long the customer browses, what age or sex or family income they may have and what they click on, the internet is become a major resource for shopping data.

    Today, this sort of thing is possible not just for online experiences; it’s possible for physical experiences as well — and not just retail shopping. This vivid view of the end-to-end experiences is rapidly changing the way people think about, measure, and manage their customer relationships. from The Internet of Things Is Changing How We Manage Customer Relationships

    1. Listen to your customer

    Always listen. Even if you have a angry customer who just found out the expense for hiring you, you have to be willing to listen because all they want is someone to listen to their anger. Once they finish, then you can start giving them some ideas and reasons for the costs of the service.

    We have listened to many angry customers finding out that the simple garage they want to build is going to cost them more money and more hours of paperwork and design to do it.

    Whenever you engage with a customer, listen to what he has to say. Eliminate distractions, make eye contact and nod occasionally to let him know you’re paying attention. Once he’s finished, ask clarifying questions to ensure you fully understand the situation. When you truly hear what a customer has to say, you convey to him that he (and his opinions) are important to you.  from 8 Ways to Offer Stellar Customer Service That Don’t Cost a Penny

    2. Own up to your Mistakes

    No matter how talented, how experienced or how organized you are, there is always the possibility of making an error that affects a customer. No one is perfect.

    Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.   Salvador Dali

    Never lie or try to deceive a customer. Own what happened and offer a sincere apology. “I apologize” is a simple, yet powerful phrase. Your genuine honesty will endear clients and establish trust. from 8 Ways to Offer Stellar Customer Service That Don’t Cost a Penny

    3. Get Feedback

    It is always good to get feedback from customers to see “how are you doing.”

    In our home business, we had to do little paid advertising as we usually had previous clients happy with our service and we will get referrals from them.  There is nothing stronger than personal referrals to get new clients. 

    So, place systems into your business to get feedback from your clients whether it is a “thank you card, how did we do?” or “customer completion form.

    Conducting a brief survey goes a long way toward deeper engagement. It gives customers the chance to provide immediate feedback while the experience is fresh in their minds. Asking questions such as “How satisfied are you with our service today?” and “Is there anything we can do better?” also provides an opportunity to gain insight into unmet needs.  from 4 Ways to Extend Customer Service Beyond Your 1-800-Number

    4. Nurture the relationship with the customer

    When you’ve spent so much time, effort and money to earn the trust of your customers, it only makes sense to nurture the relationship to the point of turning them into brand loyalists. To do so, you have to pay more attention to the customers that aren’t currently buying anything but are likely to buy again in the future.from How to Get Customers to Keep Coming Back.

    Some ways to nurture your relationship with your customers:

    1. Give them value that will enrich their life.
    2. Keep in regular communication with your customers.

     

    5. Negative Reviews travel 10 times faster than Positive reviews

    Why is it that negative comments travel faster than positive? Is it the stress building up into anger keeping you focused on remembering to write up a negative review? I think it is part of being human to remember your negative experiences more so you avoid them than the positive!  So, try to remember to keep an eye of reviews being made about your product and deal with the negative reviews quickly!

    When customers have a good meal or experience in your establishment, they will post pictures and tell their friends on Facebook and Instagram to visit your business. The same is true if they have a negative experience — and consumers tend to post more if they’ve had a bad time. These reviews are real and can significantly impact your bottom line. from Feeling the Sting of Recent Rotten Reviews on Yelp?

    So, to summarize:

    1. Listen to your Customer
    2. Own up to your mistakes
    3. Get Feedback
    4. Nurture the customer relationship
    5. Negative reviews travel 10x faster than positive reviews

    and if you remember these five tips to better customer service you will develop a relationship with your customer that will last long past the first sale!

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