For tech companies, systems which facilitate customer loyalty must be a top priority as the digital landscape continues its rapid expansion.
As you already know, it takes 7x’s the money and effort to get a new customer than to keep a current customer happy, but with growth comes challenges. You must be able to sustain their happy factor, along with that growth.
The Number One – Single Key is that you Make It Easy For Your Customers To Do Business With You!
But how???…you may ask! I am happy to share several ways with you, that will make for amazing improvements.
First Up. Have a solid customer onboarding system in place, and automate as much of it as possible. Onboarding is simply the process that gets your new customers all of the information they need, upfront. Anticipate their needs, keep improving this as you receive feedback, and do everything possible to stop the need to ask questions, or lodge complaints, before those needs even have a chance to even surface.
Second. Make sure that getting answers to questions is easy. Have a solid Knowledge Base that truly is searchable based on several keyword types of combinations, so your customers can find what they need. And, if they can’t find it or need help otherwise, then be sourced up well enough to handle inquiries quickly – AND thoroughly.
Some companies that I have found that do this extremely well – and that have my undying loyalty are Dubsado, ClickUp, Teamwork, and Gravity Forms. While Teamwork and Gravity forms may have a longer turn around time, because it is a ticket system, their answers are thorough and you rarely have any back and forth. They anticipate additional questions, they take their time with things like screenshots, and recently Gravity Forms even performed a function I was stuck on for me – rather than trying to explain it. He showed me how it was to be done.
Third. Don’t allow any customer support person to be a bottleneck to getting to you! Or to at least a senior person in your organization. While their job is to handle customer service, and to some degree some complaints, once someone says “let me speak to the manager” there should be no further discussion. Nothing infuriates a customer more than a customer support representative that appears to be an ego driven individual on a power trip, that is refusing to acquiesce to their request. Even if that’s not the case, that is how it appears to them – and it is surely one of the quickest ways to lose their loyalty.
It’s no secret that many of your customers are likely to leave you for a competitor if they can’t get help or find their way around. If this sounds like it could be true, don’t wait another minute before implementing an onboarding system and making sure all customer service representatives know the ropes when it comes to showing new customers just how great your company is.
While there is always room for improvement in any business, take a few minutes today to determine where you might have some holes in your customer service process and make them part of tomorrow’s success story!
