Losing customers is one of the worst things about business. Whether you’re a big business and you don’t actually meet your customers face to face, or a smaller business and you meet with your customers before they have a product/service from you, losing them can be devastating.
You could lose customers for many reasons. Maybe the quality of your product wasn’t up to scratch, or maybe they felt your customer service lacking. If you do anything today, make sure you make a note of these tips that will help you to avoid ever losing a customer again:
Build Real Relationships With Your Customers
This point cannot be stressed enough: you must build real relationships with your customers if you’re going to keep them. Failing to make an effort to build relationships with them will result in them going off to other brands and businesses. Make sure you try to make your efforts as personalised as possible, and actually make your customers feel like they are special to you.
Hone Your Service
Take a good look at your service and figure out how you can hone it to make it even better. Are there ways you can streamline your website to make sure everything can be found easier, and that the buying process is simple? You can introduce things like about bug tracking to improve your processes, but there are more out there. Make sure you do your research. Always think of the customer experience and keep it at the forefront of your mind.
Give Customers Loyalty Points Or Discounts
Make sure you give your customers loyalty points or discounts. This gives them more of an incentive to keep on coming back to you. However, you shouldn’t focus too much on your ‘big’ clients or even brand new clients. Treating groups of clients differently will only cause problems.
Listen To Your Customers
Make sure you actually listen to your customers about what you can improve on. They may not always word it politely, but listening to them can greatly help a business to improve.
Avoid High Employee Turnovers
People buy from people, so chances are, your customers would come to know and love your employees. This means you need to treat your employees right, and avoid a high employee turnover. If you don’t, you could become just another faceless business.
Make Resolving Problems Simple
Everyone comes up against problems from time to time, it’s largely unavoidable. However, you need to make resolving problems simple. Having policies and guidelines is all well and good, but you should give employees freedom to make judgement calls. This will allow them to come up with solutions faster, and keep the customer satisfied. This can result in an even stronger customer relationship. It’s so important that your customers feel like their problem has been truly resolved. Remember, they don’t care about your guidelines. All they want is their problem fixed!
Start implementing these tips into your business and you’ll avoid losing customers. Leave your thoughts below!