Question… Can you think of a successful company that hasn’t invested time and money towards customer service?
Nowadays, many companies across all industries are after the same thing: ‘Customer Satisfaction’. If there are no customers, there is no business. Keeping a customer happy has become the number one priority. Unfortunately, it is not as easy as one, two, three; It’s an ongoing process which requires the time and the ability to detect and comprehend customers’ needs.
In order to better understand this concept, take yourself as an example; you will indeed forever be someone’s customer and you will forever have expectations regarding the level of service delivered to you. In an ideal world, we all wish to be like ‘Mr. Happy Customer’ in the picture above. We want a product or a service to fit our needs, to respond to our expectations and most importantly we want these to have a positive impact on our lives and improve the way we do things.
It’s crucial to understand that having happy customers can lead to the success of your own business. Together with this, it can also lead to the success of your customers’ businesses. If you succeed in achieving this, you will quickly reach a very high rate of customer retention which will be very financially rewarding.
How to do so?
There is no magic trick, however, cloud-based software could be a big part of the solution as it allows a rapid integration into the business and its processes. The Harvard Business Review explains that the acquisition of a new customer is 25 times more costly than retaining an existing one. According to research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company, increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits from 25% to 95%. Having those figures in mind, you might want to reconsider the way you engage with your customers.
What if you could give your clients access to important information at any time through a portal gathering all your work activity? Or think about it the other way around; What a great added value for a client to have real time updates and accurate data regarding the work that they are paying for. By keeping the door open and constantly keeping your clients in the loop, you establish a valuable truthful and transparent relationship with them.
Gathering data was once extremely time consuming and a hard task to complete. Now, a piece of software can do it all for you rapidly and error free.
Now, getting back to the question at the beginning of the article, the answer is very certainly none!
Indeed, it is very difficult to be successful without having solid customer service. There is no way to find out if the service that you provide is any good until the customer comes into play. Customers should at the heart of all business strategies! So, get the right tools on board in order to better suit their needs and efficiently respond to their expectations.
