Yes, You Can Love Your Customers AND Grow Your Business
It’s pretty easy to sell anything once. Slashing prices and offering promotions can be quite persuasive. Armed with these types of incentives, even the most inept salesperson can usually persuade someone to buy something eventually. What counts, however, is whether or not you’ll ever be able to sell that person anything again.
It might take a little time, effort and money, but good customer service is essential – especially if you want to grow your business. Customers who receive great service are happy and satisfied. And happy, satisfied customers are better than any salespeople you could ever hope to employ. They’re also very loyal, and will buy from you again. Repeat business is what helps your company grow.
Generally speaking, companies have between a 60 and 70% chance of selling something to an existing customer, but only a five to 20% probability of selling to a new prospect. And, according to a report by the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, a loyal customer is worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase.
An article in the Harvard Business Review reports that a five percent increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profits. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, loyal customers tend to buy more and more from you over time. They also refer others to you, whom, in turn, will refer others themselves. Finally, they are usually happy to pay a premium to carry on doing business with your company, rather than experiment with a competitor with whom they’re both unfamiliar and uncomfortable.
“Customer loyalty exists when a customer chooses to do business with a company even when a less expensive, more convenient, or higher quality alternative is available somewhere else.”
Good Customer Service Is Essential for SMEs
Providing great customer service is important for any business, but it’s absolutely critical for SMEs wanting to grow. On average, a happy customer tells between four and six people about their experience. A dissatisfied customer on the other hand, tells between nine and 15 people about their negative experience. In addition, almost 80% of customers have cancelled an intended purchase or transaction after receiving poor customer service. 91% never come back to your company again. Small businesses simply cannot survive this for very long.
We get that you want to grow your business. But you can’t afford to let customer service slide in the process. You can never be too busy or too successful to attend to your customers. They are, after all, the very lifeblood of your company. No matter how big or small you are, good customer service should be at the very heart of your business model.
What Does Good Customer Service Look Like?
It’s no longer good enough to treat them the way your yourself would like to be treated. You have to treat customers the way they’d like to be treated. It’s not rocket science. In fact, it often starts with something as simple as always answering your phone. Or replying to an email, responding to an online query or addressing a social media comment.
With all the technology available today, customers expect you to always be contactable. Over 40 percent of customers expect a response to their social media query within one hour, and 32 percent expect a response in just 30 minutes. As social media expert Jay Baer says in an article for Forbes, “A lack of response is actually a response. It’s a response that says, ‘We don’t care about you very much’.”
Email doesn’t get much of a break either. Originally, the sheer beauty of email was that you could send it when it was convenient for you. The recipient could then read it when it was convenient for them. You both had the opportunity to compose well thought out and considered replies, without being subject to the time pressures you experience when talking on the phone.
Well, so much for that.
That handy smartphone in our pocket means we always have access to email and social media. According to a survey by Toister Performance Solutions, 80% of customers feel satisfied receiving a response to their email within four hours. 14 percent felt an answer in 5 minutes was acceptable! And yet, in its 2018 Customer Service Benchmark Report, SuperOffice found that a staggering 62% of businesses don’t respond to customer service emails at all! In the light of what we’ve just been talking about, this makes no sense whatsoever. Why would you want to risk angering a customer over something that’s as easy to do as replying to an email? As customer service guru Don Gallegos says, win the customer, not the argument.
Big Tech For Small Business
Huge Connect has been supplying reliable, always-on telecommunications to big and small businesses since 2005. By outsourcing wifi, Internet, telephony and other telecommunications needs, small businesses are able to offer the same great levels of customer service as large ones. There’s no excuse not to answer your phones to respond to emails – no matter where you are. Chat to us about how great telecoms can help you grow your business – without sacrificing customer service.
