Are You Making Your Customer Smile?

A happy customer will lead to a long and fruitful relationship which will profit your business ultimately.

As an enterprise or start-up, do you ask yourself this question: How do I make my customers smile?

Customers are not little children. Candy will not appease. Brightly colored things will only contain their attention for a couple of seconds. Sweet words and promises are forgotten soon enough.

So what “charms,” do you wonder, work on them? Well, the answer is quite simple.

1. Treat the customer wisely: Advertisements do influence customers but the product or service you give speaks in a greater volume. Your business has to be sure that the product you sell fulfills the purpose it was meant for. A tube of toothpaste is after all just toothpaste. Can you fight aliens with it? Probably not. But you can definitely go to battle with a winning smile. So, tell the customer this story and let your product shine.
2. Serve the customer efficiently: The effectiveness of your front-end sales and marketing should reflect in your back-end customer care service. Is your contact center working all the time? Are your agents serving customers with the right information? Are you able to resolve all issues to a satisfactory result? If you answer “no” to any of these questions, rethink your strategy and focus on customer care more.
3. Give the customer a candy: Your RoI (return on investment) will determine the company’s outlook for next year. If your enterprise is profiting, thank the customers for their contribution. Making them feel special will get you rave reviews. Ignoring them will you give you bad press. Tokens, like a card of dedicated loyalty to your brand, calendars, notebooks, pens, and other such gifts can be distributed to create goodwill. It would ensure that you sustain customers because of the “feel-good” factor. And if you thought this was an intangible factor with no solid results, think again. The social media is full of examples of companies who failed to service and lost considerable business because the customers aired their grievances on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
4. Tell your agents to serve with a smile: If your customer care representative is serving with a smile, the customer will also smile. Good service will make the customer happy. So make sure you invest in keeping your agents satisfied and trained. Their service also determines future and present sales, so ensure that they can service you well.

A smiling customer will tell 10 people about what you did right. Regardless of the scale of your operation, target those 10 potential customers instead of blindly chasing a 100. Use reliable call center software to automate your outreach process and target priority customers differently than recent or potential customers. And every time you walk into your office, think of this: are you making your customers smile?