{"id":4342,"date":"2011-09-10T21:14:39","date_gmt":"2011-09-11T04:14:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bspcn.com\/?p=4342"},"modified":"2011-09-10T21:14:39","modified_gmt":"2011-09-11T04:14:39","slug":"5-ways-to-make-your-customers-love-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/2011\/09\/10\/5-ways-to-make-your-customers-love-you\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Ways to Make Your Customers Love You"},"content":{"rendered":"

Written by hubspot<\/a><\/p>\n

\"i<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This is a guest post written by Samir Soriano, the director of marketing at ReTargeter<\/a> who enjoys helping, learning, and doing.<\/em><\/p>\n

Great customer service<\/a> has your order ready for you when you walk in, greets you by your first name, and gives you a friendly smile when you leave. It makes previous, current, and potential customers feel good when they think about you. Unfortunately, the personal interaction necessary for great customer service is severely limited to ecommerce and web-based businesses that continue to grow. But although the web makes customer service harder to focus on, this doesn\u2019t mean you should abandon it! The following five tactics will help you take your customer service, and your entire business, to the next level.<\/p>\n

To understand why you should focus on customer service<\/a>, it\u2019s important to first understand its 3 key benefits. These benefits will effectively help your business achieve its marketing, customer volume, and revenue goals you\u2019ve set:<\/p>\n

3 Key Benefits of Great Customer Service<\/strong><\/h4>\n

1. Earned Media:<\/strong> Providing a good<\/em> customer experience will give you some presentable and potentially press-worthy testimonials<\/a>. Step this up a notch! Providing a great<\/em> customer experience will also give you press-worthy testimonials from respected people, unsolicited praise from people\u2019s personal blogs and presentations, and inbound links.<\/p>\n

2. Customer Retention:<\/strong> In the world of business, customers are kings and queens, and they should be treated accordingly. As a business, your customers are your most valuable assets. They are the ones taking a risk on your product or service, and they are the ones driving your revenue numbers. Focusing on customer service can greatly increase your resell, cross-sell, and up-sell opportunities. In fact, the Harvard Business Review<\/a> even found that \u201cwhen MBNA America, a Delaware-based credit card company, cut its 10% defection rate in half, profits rose a whopping 125%.\u201d<\/p>\n

3. Referral Business:<\/strong> When customers are publicly praising you<\/a> and sticking around for a while, everyone in their network will start to notice you as well. This gives you the opportunity to earn new business from your current customers’ networks. The beauty here is that when you continue to deliver solid customer experiences, your entire customer base\u2019s network will grow with it, driving potentially exponential customer growth to your business.<\/p>\n

As every successful business person knows, theory is great, but action is better. Here are 5 tactical ways to improve your brand\u2019s customer service…<\/p>\n

5 Ways to Improve Customer Service<\/strong><\/h4>\n

1. Open additional lines of communication to make you easily accessible.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Far too often, people become frustrated with their vendors due to a lack of communication channels. Email\u2019s just one channel, but some people are more comfortable talking on the phone or through social channels.<\/p>\n

A simple and easy way to start focusing on customer service is by opening additional lines of communication with your audience. This can be as simple as adding your phone number and address to your website or mentioning your Twitter <\/a>username in your email signature. But more importantly, there should be a human at the end of each of these channels. Unanswered tweets and voicemails are not a good way to maintain your customers’ happiness. Providing high-touch, human-based contact options to all of your customers is just good customer service.<\/p>\n

2. Nurture your audience to push helpful content directly to your leads and customers.<\/p>\n

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Sometimes, customers don\u2019t want to talk to anyone at all \u2013 instead, they\u2019d rather figure out how to use your platform or product by themselves. Google AdWords<\/a> bets heavily on this, as they provide a ton of helpful content<\/a> waiting for customers to find all by themselves. Here are some additional ways to push content directly to your audience:<\/p>\n