To retain customers, drive repeat purchases, and continue to grow your business, you must provide your customers with a five star experience, every time they use your site or interact with your company.
Especially if your business is in its early stages, it’s crucial to have a clear focus in everything you do – from building an excellent customer experience to providing a forum for customer service feedback.
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Ultimately, customer satisfaction and trust will require hard work from your team. But it’s critical to the long term success of your business. By implementing these five steps, your business will be on its way to building a loyal customer base, and driving sales.
Spend Extra on Customer Service
First and foremost, your customers’ happiness and satisfaction should be top priority. It’s important to devote both attention and resources to guaranteeing a positive experience. Staff up to ensure you have a strong customer service team available to handle any customer issues. The specialized attention will benefit your customers in the short term, and drive repeat sales for your business in the long term.
Ask for Feedback
Invite your customers to review their experiences. You can ask for the feedback through your digital channels, email marketing, and newsletters. Inviting your customers to share their recent experiences will create a dialogue, allow you to catch issues before they become detrimental to your business, and lets customers know how much you value them. Once you are regularly soliciting reviews, you’ll be able to identify your strengths and weaknesses as a merchant, and constantly evolve.
Engage Your Customers One-on-One
Listen. Respond. Rescue – These should be your three word mantra, in regards to customer engagement. Especially if a customer has something bad to say – take advantage of the situation as an opportunity to potentially save a customer. Respond to each review with a thoughtful note and/or solution. In addition to the reviews you are collecting, make sure you track social media for any customer feedback. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram provide additional venues through which to rescue unhappy customers and save revenue.
Analyze and Implement Customer Insights
Swallow your pride, and take a close look at the commentary your customers are providing, via reviews and digital channels. What do they like? What do they dislike? It may be that a new product feature seemed sensational when your internal team discussed it, but your customers aren’t responding. If the consumer isn’t interested, reconsider. If customers are asking for an update – make it. Once you’ve improved areas of concern in your product or service, reach back out and let customers know you have listened and took action.
Repeat and Refine the Cycle
As you continue to collect feedback, engage customers, and implement changes to your product, challenge your staff to refine the process. It may be that you are collecting reviews too quickly, or through an inefficient channel. Determine how you can optimize every step along the way – solicitation, analysis, customer service – and continue to evolve, as a business. Your customer base will reward you.
Jordan Garner is Director of Marketing at Trustpilot.