Like everyone else, your customers are busy, and they do not have time to wait for…anything. As a business owner, it is up to you to meet their scheduling demands, which will encourage them to come back. But the bigger your business grows, the more difficult it can be to cater to the personal needs of each client. While it is more difficult, it’s not impossible.
Here are a few ways you can speed things up and put smiles on your customers’ faces.
Enhance their online experience.
These days, most people turn to the web for information and to make purchases. If you don’t give them a good experience online, they will simply scroll to the next business’s webpage. Make sure that you have an excellent hosting service, and preferably one that fits your budget. web hosting company provides e-commerce, SEO services, social media marketing, and more. Before choosing a service, check uptime reliability.
Increase employee efficiency.
Your employee’s actions significantly affect the customer experience, as Bluchic notes. Inefficient employees may not have orders completed on time, and this reflects poorly on you.
The good news is that you don’t have to hover over every employee to ensure they are doing
their job when they are supposed to.
One of the easiest ways to increase productivity is to simply show your appreciation. Simply giving good feedback and acknowledging their efforts can go a long way towards improved productivity and retention. It won’t cost you a dime, but the payoff is priceless.
Another important factor is of a more practical nature. Your staffing schedule also matters, since an appropriately-staffed company has all of the bodies and minds it needs in place to get things done. There are free services that can help you with this, too. ZoomShift is an excellent example. It provides scheduling services to companies of all sizes, but is geared toward businesses with fewer than 100 team members.
Meet them at the mailbox.
If your business does not collect money at the time of service, make sure your clients have easy access to their invoices. DocuSend is a cloud-based virtual mailroom that can handle both domestic and international mail, and it adds inserts, such as a remittance envelope or discount coupon, to your invoices. There are other similar services you can explore to find the one that matches your needs and budget. This will save you the time and trouble of doing it yourself manually – and for about half the price of handling mail in house.
Develop some protections.
You’re excited to start growing your business, and you’re focused on learning exactly what you
need to do to keep your customers coming back for your products and services. But during this
time, you can’t neglect to develop a safety net to protect your company from legal problems.
How do you go about setting up this safety net? First, you can form an LLC for your company and register it in your state by using an affordable online formation service. (And you might just be wondering, what is a LLC business? LLC stands for limited liability company, and just like it sounds, it limits your company’s liability, which means it protects your personal assets in the event of a lawsuit.) After you’ve completed this process, you can get to work on developing a cybersecurity plan for your company.
If you want to protect your own data and your customers’ data, you need to invest in cybersecurity tools. As Complete Controller explains, you don’t want to deal with the aftermath of a hacker gaining access to this data! It can lead to lost customers, lost income, a lost reputation, and even close your doors permanently.
While this is certainly not a full list of ways to keep your customers moving, it’s a good start. So
remember, give them a great experience from the moment they find you online until it’s time to
pay the bill. Don’t make them wait around for their products or services, and you won’t be left
wondering if they will return.
Article by: Lucy Reed, Owner/Blogger/Developer of Gigmine.co
