5 Tips for Customer Retention
Customer service is vital to ensuring that you get a high percentage of repeat customers. This can not only get customers to use your products/services again but can also lead to referrals, recommendations and the best form of marketing – word of mouth.
This allows your business to grow and inturn can also improve staff morale and motivation, with the resulting positive effects of increased staff retention and turnover.
Our main aim is to keeping the customer happy, ideally forming a relationship and to make sure that what you say, is what you do.
Here are 5 tips to good customer service and customer retention.
1 Make sure that the customer can contact you.
Answer your phone, respond quickly to emails or requests for information. If you are not in the office forward your calls to a mobile phone, a colleague or use a phone answering service. Make sure you calls are answered correctly. 7 out of 10 people never leave a message on voicemail, try to get your customers to speak to real people.
2 If you make bold statements – make sure you can deliver them.
You can write and market many impressive statements about your service or products, but if the reality falls short you may lose your clients and they certainly won’t become repeat customers.
3 Listen & Respond to your customers.
Whether it be positive or negative feedback, establish how can you resolve their problem, let them explain what their issues are, what would make them happy and how can you make them happy. Listen to what they are saying, their tone, body language and their feelings – you can get good word of mouth from just dealing with complaints in the correct way. Equally, 80% of customers will tell people if their complaint is not handled well.
4 Go beyond the customers expectation.
Surprise your customers – what can you do to add to the customers experience – give some free advice, walk the customer to a product they requested, give them something extra (discount, coupon) – make a little bit of extra effort and the customer remembers and will be more likely to tell other people. It may cost you a little but the gains are a lot.
5 Feedback- 2 way communication.
Communicate with your customers, encourage them to make suggestions, provide an easy method of communication, that allows them to feel confident to provide constructive feedback, listen to what they say and respond, let them know the results and what you plan to do. Been seen to be responding. Every stakeholder should have input to creating your customer service standards – management, employees, customers (existing, former and potential), competitors and regulatory authorities.
A good source of data and standards are Institute of Customer Service
