The path towards business success often seems challenging, but there are ways to make the journey smoother. For example, by turning the focus towards your customers. After all, in the end, if they’re happy then the outlook for your operation will be much rosier. While you’ll need to balance their interests against your own, businesses that turn a blind eye to their customers — or at least fail to take their needs and wishes seriously — often find that they reach a roadblock at some point or another.
In this post, we’ll run through some handy tips that business owners can adopt that’ll help to create a customer-friendly climate — and which should ultimately nudge your business forward.
Understand Who They Are
You can’t create a customer-friendly environment if you don’t know who your customers are. All too often, you’ll find leaders talk about “customers” as if they’re a uniform group, but this isn’t the case. While you can argue that there are characteristics that unite all consumers, your specific target audience will exist in their own category.
The easiest, most effective way to create operations that serve the needs of your customers is to figure out what those needs are in the first place. Creating in-depth customer profiles that help you to understand as many details about your customers as possible can help with a host of strategic decisions, including your branding. Remember that your customer insights should evolve over time — your customers won’t stay the same forever!
Solving a Problem
It’s easy to get bogged down in the nitty-gritty of running a business. But it’s worth remembering that, ultimately, your business is there to solve a problem — or, at least, it should be. While you’ll have to work on various aspects of your operations, fundamentally your primary objective should be on helping your customers to solve an issue. Work with that framework in mind, and you’ll be likely to always have your customer’s best interests in mind.
The basic pathway for a business should look like this. Your customer has a problem; your product/service addresses that problem; you develop your delivery and offerings to minimize your customer’s pain points.
Easy to Reach
In an ideal world, your customers would be delighted with your goods/services ten times out of ten. But that’s not a realistic pursuit. In reality, your customers will have issues or questions. Even companies that invest significantly in their website copy end up missing some information that their customers need.
That’s not a major issue. What is an issue is if the customer can’t get in touch with a customer service representative. Nothing will frustrate a customer more than struggling to find a contact number or other communication method when it’s needed. At that point, you’re not helping your customers; you’re hindering them. Endeavor to have as many communication methods available on your site as possible, including social media profiles, live chat feature, and phone number.
Handling Issues
In that vein, businesses should also review their problem-solving processes. As we just said, while you’d like to imagine that your visitors will never experience a problem when interacting with your business, reality says otherwise. It’ll happen. When it does, maintaining your customer’s trust will depend on how well you manage and resolve the issue. For example, a business that makes the customer do all the heavy lifting (paying postage fees, arranging packaging) might preserve some of their revenue, but they’ll lose the customer. People make judgements based on how relationships look during difficult moments, not the good times!
User Guides and Tutorials
You’ll possess in-depth knowledge about your products and how to use them. Your customer may possess that knowledge. In all likelihood, they’ll need a little help — after all, they weren’t there during the development stage. You can help your customers by putting together user guides and tutorials that clearly explain to customers how to use your products properly. This will require some time and effort on your behalf, but it’ll pay off. As well as helping existing customers, it can also help to attract new customers, since online resources can be an excellent inbound marketing tactic.
Make Their Lives Easier
It’s not just the product you deliver to your customers that counts. The packaging does, too. You’ll often find businesses invest significantly in a product, only to deliver it in underwhelming packaging. And that doesn’t just hurt your brand: it also makes things more difficult for the customer. In some cases, it can have a significantly detrimental impact. That’s certainly the case in the medical field, where packaging can have a noticeable impact on patient outcomes. To remedy that, medical companies invest in medication adherence packaging that ensures patients find it as easy as possible to manage their medication schedule. For other companies, the correct packaging may simply be one that is easy to open and delivers the product intact. In any case, the bottom line should be: don’t treat packaging as an afterthought. It’ll form part of the customer’s experience in one way or another.
Innovation
Your customer will trust that you’re on the cutting edge of all that’s happening in your industry. After all, no one wants to give their hard-earned money to a brand that’s falling behind the times. You can help your customers by continually innovating and improving your brand in line with industry standards. It’ll give your customers peace of mind that they’re working with the right business, which helps them in a way that they very much appreciate: they won’t need to go searching for a new brand to work with.
Gather Feedback
There’s a lot of behind the scenes work that businesses can take that’ll help their customers. However, many of these methods involve a lot of guesswork. From time to time, it can be beneficial to get directly to the source and simply ask the customer directly what they want. If you’ve built up a relationship with customers over many years, then they’ll likely be more than happy to give you their thoughts and feelings. Remember that gathering the feedback is only the first stage; from there, you’ll need to actively put it into practice.
Empower Employees
You can help your customers by helping your staff. All too often, customers will face a problem that could be easily resolved, if only the employee had the power to make things happen. In those moments, things have to go on longer than necessary — and in the process, the customer loses out. Giving your employees the power to make decisions is an excellent way to enhance your customer service, and it’ll bring the bonus of helping your employees feel happier in their roles, which can also have a positive impact on productivity and revenue.
Find The Sweet Price Point
Unless you operate in a luxury market segment where part of the appeal is a large price tag, you’ll need to think about how your pricing strategy impacts your customers. Sometimes, the best way to help a person is to simply give them the product at a price they can stomach. Now, this will naturally come into conflict with your own objective, which is to build revenue. The best approach is to figure out the right price point for your goods and services — it should be low enough to be appealing to your customers, but high enough that it leads to a sustainable business model. This article can help if you’re struggling to price your products or services.
Offer a Customer Loyalty Program
Customers, like everyone else, want to feel valued. Businesses often make their customers feel like the most important person in the world before they become customers, but then largely forget about them once they’re on board. In these cases, businesses are making their customers’ lives easier, but not in the way they’d like: they’re making it easier for their customers to join a competitor. Incorporating a customer loyalty program into your operations can be an effective way to give back to your customers in a way that makes sense for your bottom line. This article runs through some handy steps for starting a customer loyalty program at your business.
Self-Service
People value their autonomy. If there’s something that they can do on their own, then that’s the option they’ll take, most of the time anyway. Think of people who check into a hotel after a day of traveling. They don’t want to sit and discuss the weather with someone behind the desk. They want to use the self-check-in machine to get to their room as quickly as possible. When possible, look at incorporating this approach into your operations. It might be possible to put significant power into your customer’s hands without damaging your core operations. However, remember that it’s best to retain the option for customers to complete tasks the traditional way (for example: having an employee do it).
And that’s it. Take the tips outlined above, and you’ll be helping your customers as much as can reasonably be expected.
