[pullquote align=”normal” cite=”Steve Jobs, co-founder Apple”]You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.[/pullquote]
Marketing doesn’t just refer to proper ad-placement and a well-crafted newsletter, it encompasses the entire customer experience. Instead of throwing out random fishing lines and expecting to get some nibbles, marketing teams need to go a step further, building ways to reach out and nurture contacts along the way to help build relationships from the ground up.
Every action someone takes to interact with your business is a step toward building a relationship, and each action should be met with the proper response. When we pay attention to the small details we can not only fulfill the needs of our customer but it shows that we are actively listening and makes them a better resource for future feedback.
Everyone knows that first impressions are incredibly important, and this could be something as simple as a responding conversationally to a customer’s call requesting your hours of operations. Always respond quickly and accurately but don’t stop there, take the time to actively engage your customer, no matter the reason for their call. Something as simple as using their name will immediately develop a rapport.
While most leaders are familiar with the best ways to show off products and provide services, many fall short in terms of creating an entire customer experience that will have clients and buyers returning to do business with you again and again. Customer retention is the key to a secure business, and to do this you’ll need to carry that transaction through from initial contact, to transaction, to post-transaction follow up.
It’s a no-brainer that checking in and confirming everything was satisfactory once the service has been provided, giving the customer to provide feedback, show that your business cares about them – but you may be surprised by how few companies actually take this step.
A Culture of Communication
Strong leaders build a culture to welcome feedback in every form, including criticism, from their customers. Customers will feel more loyalty towards a brand if they feel like their voice is taken seriously, and you can prepare your team to listen for it and extract details that can improve the overall customer experience.
Also it’s important prepare your team members who interact with customers to draw boundaries and to professionally interrupt any inappropriate communications that border on verbal abuse or personal attacks. Feedback is the central objective, and that excludes therapy or unrestricted venting.
The Importance of Follow-Up
Another way to retain ongoing business relationships with your clients is to touch base occasionally, which serves to keep your brand in the front of their minds. The days of just sending a generic holiday card out to previous clients is long gone. With the existence of social media businesses have the ability to quickly engage directly with customer and create content that can inspire, inform, or entertain them.
Social media also creates the opportunity for you to develop lede magnets to attract new customers. Then, you can use the information gathered from these to follow-up with promising clients. For example, it’s OK to follow-up and ask if the resource someone requested helped solve the problem.
For instance, when you download a guide to buying an electric car, it’s likely to be early in the process so a follow up message would be consistent with being helpful. Or, if someone downloaded a guide called “10 Mistakes to Avoid When Choosing an HSA” you can safely gather that this person is further along the process an follow-up with an appropriate (and greater) level of interaction.
A lack of effective customer engagement is typically the main reason why you’re just not reaching your projected sales goals. By adjusting the way you handle the customer experience, taking more time to ensure that everything from initial contact, to the first sale, to the tenth sale is an experience worthy of repeating, you are creating a sustainable environment for sales that people will want to tell everyone about, and keep your customers coming back.
About Grow Business Now
At Grow Business Now, we work with senior leaders of privately held companies with scalable business models who want to overcome the 6 big obstacles to growth in record time.