6 Ways To Keep Your Business Appealing To Customers
As a business, keeping your customers interested in your company is going to be an ongoing struggle. You might find that members of your competition are able to offer things that your company can’t afford to do right now. Even if this is the case, there are some things that you can do to keep your business appealing to your customers. You just need to know what your clients are looking for in a business and need to be flexible enough to make your company fit that mold. Here are some of the things that you can do to keep your customers.
Respond To Negative Feedback
Sometimes customers leave negative feedback and a lot of companies just ignore it. This is something that you should avoid at all costs. If you respond to the negative feedback and try to figure out how you can please the client, it shows your customers and others that you care enough to try and fix any problem they may have.
Don’t think that negative feedback is going to break your company straight away. If you do not respond and let the word of mouth spread, then it might. However, if you nip it in the bud and respond to any negative feedback that you receive in a timely manner, you will be offering something that most companies don’t.
Keep Your Offices Professional
When your customers come down to your place of business, they are expecting to see a professional office. If this is not what they see, they are likely to be put off rather quickly. This can be anything from an unprofessional design to a foul smell throughout the office. The former should never be a problem because your office should never feel like the living room of someone’s home.
If you are dealing with the latter, then it could be a ventilation issue, and the smells are coming from certain areas of your business. If you find that your business is experiencing this problem, there are ways that you can fix this. You might not know what you are looking for or how to tell if this is a ventilation problem. If this is the case, you can learn from Maplewood Plumbing.
Don’t know how to fix it yourself? There are always companies that can do this for you. This should be sorted as soon as possible as you don’t want a poorly ventilated area of your business to lose you your customers.
Use Social Media
Social media is a great way to keep in touch with your customers. This way, you will be able to say what they are saying about your business, the good points and the bad. It also allows you to send them messages when needed and respond to any feedback that they post online in an informal way. This will really help your business to see where your company is succeeding and where you could improve. Sometimes, people will say things on social media that they would not put in formal feedback.
If you are going to use social media, your business needs to be flexible enough to change and improve with what your customers are saying. If you are going to go into this with the mindset of ‘my business is perfect, and the customers are wrong,’ then this is not going to be the best option for you. However, customers like to be able to contact businesses in this way, so if you can use social media, this is definitely a good way to keep your clients attracted to your business.
Stay Competitive
If all of your competitors lower their prices, you need to try and do this too. It might not be possible at the time to do something like this due to your financial situation. However, if you can afford to do it, then you should. While people will typically choose the company with the best customer services, if your price is 10% higher than everyone else on the market, this just won’t be worth it for the customers.
Customer Service
Customer service is going to be vital to keep your customers. If you have poor customer service, the customers you do have will be more likely to go to a business that offers them better service. It has been stated that customers are more likely to stick with a company who has outstanding customer services, over those who have fast services.
Something that you should consider is having bilingual customer services. You can do this for the most common languages spoken in the country that you are in. This way, communicating with people whose first language isn’t English will be a lot easier. Many companies don’t do this so it will be viewed as an act of caring on the part of your company. This will attract new people to your business and keep the customers you have.
Show Your Appreciation
All it takes is a polite ‘thank you’ at the end of a conversation. Something as small as this can make your customers feel appreciated. Even if the customer has said thank you at the end of a meeting, simply saying ‘you’re welcome’ is fine, but it doesn’t show that you are grateful to them for choosing your company. Instead, even if they say thank you first, just follow this with your own thank you so that they feel appreciated too.
If you want to take this a step further, you can send a thank you note or set up some sort of reward for referrals. Even these simple things will make your customers feel like they are important to your business. This will build lasting relationships, meaning that your customers will be more likely to stay loyal to you and your business.
Keeping your customers is always going to be a challenge, and there are many factors that feed into whether they stay with your company or go somewhere else. Hopefully, you have found this article useful and will use the advice that we have given to keep your company appealing to customers.