Understanding your customers is key to business success. The entire operation is pointless without them. Most businessmen know why customers are essential to their venture, but not everyone knows exactly how to take care of them. How do you understand your customers and really benefit from forming a good business-customer relationship?
- Encourage feedback
Good and bad feedbacks are both important in understanding your customers. The good ones validate the things you do well and the strategies that bring in more money, while bad ones allow you to change and improve whatever affects your business in a negative way. How do you do that?
Be responsive in social media to let the customers know that you care about their concerns. Allow them to post their reactions and comments, but keep the appropriate sections moderated for damage control purposes. Your website should also have a section dedicated for customer inquiries and concerns.
If you have a store or office, keep an opinion box where customers can drop evaluation and survey forms. You can also add a quick evaluation form when asking your customers to accomplish some documents when finalizing a purchase.
Mood meters are also very helpful and practical for customers who do not want to spend a lot of time on giving feedback. When done online, you can simply let them click a mood button (e.g. happy, sad, angry, disappointed) or when done in the traditional way, ask them to simply drop a colored paper or ball in a mood meter box. This strategy does not give you specific information, but it allows you to see the bigger picture.
- Inform the customers about future plans
After collecting, collating, and analyzing the feedback given to you, the next thing customers want to know is if you are going to do something about their feedbacks. Through periodical reports, press releases, news features, official statements, marketing materials, and audio-visual presentations, inform the public of a possible relaunch, rebranding, and introduction of new and improved strategies, protocols, and procedures just to assure current and future customers that you are doing something about certain problems.
- Spend more time on frontline operation
Frontline operations include customer relationship management and marketing management. You have customers to understand and heed, and you have products or services to sell, so be sure to allot more time on what keeps your business afloat and thriving.
But what if you have so many things on your plate? How can you prioritize and address concerns without spreading yourself and your resources too thin?
One of the best strategies to apply is outsourcing. There are a lot of reliable yet still cost-efficient companies in Toronto, Canada that offer operational support in the form of online bookkeeping services. This service allows you to delegate bookkeeping needs without compromising access to important data, allowing you to spend more time in interaction, learning, and managing your customers.
Since online bookkeeping in Canada is performed by experts, there is no longer any need to spend for the recruitment, training, and retention of your own bookkeeping team.
Understanding your customers ensure repeat business, which maximizes every opportunity to make money and promote your business for expanding your market base. Learning about their wants and needs also allows you to meet their demands and expectations by offering products and services, and subsequently making money from them.
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