There are various ways to increase sales in a growing business. You can use the Internet to further your brand awareness to the population at large. If you are making enough money you can even go as far as advertising on some other media like television or radio. There is one major source of increased sales that the majority of people under appreciate, that is your existing customer base, people who have already dealt with you in the past should be much easier to deal with again. No matter how much you increase sales, no matter how many new customers you bring in, there is a finite limit to how much you can expand. Your existing customer base is an untapped resource in most cases. Returning to existing customers and either cross selling or up selling can lead to massive amount of revenue. The key to being able to tap this resource however is to build a strong relationship with the customer. To build a strong relationship you have support the customer as well as you can. Below are some useful methods for improving the customer support process no matter how large your business is.
Use a CRM tool: The one thing that gives a customer a sense of trust like nothing else is the idea that the person at the other end of the phone has a good idea of their past contact history. Giving your staff this information at their fingertips gives them the ability to better support the customer. Letting them know what a customer has bought previously lets them know what best to recommend to them next. There are lots of CRM solutions out there that can perform this task for you. My personal preference is either Sage ACT or Sugar CRM. The Sugar CRM solution is a web based application which can be run on your own server. An added bonus in my book is that is also an Open Source software with the possibility of purchasing a payed for version with additional benefits.
Support Ticketing System: No matter how good your product is, there is an no doubt that at some point in time your customer will need to contact you for support on the product. Be that to question functionality or to simply track the delivery of their order. If you supply a product you will have to support it some how. To provide good support your staff need to be aware of the issue your customer has raised, implementing a good ticketing system is a good way to achieve this. With a ticket system that can be linked to a customer your staff can easily see when a customer phones for an update just what the customer’s problem is as well as what work has been carried out to remedy it. It’s even possible to distribute your ticketing system over the web to allow your customers to access it and see the status of their issue without the need to call your help desk. Again there are plenty of good ticketing systems out there on the web. The one I currently use is actually part of the Sugar CRM software mentioned above, it doesn’t offer all the functionality of a dedicated ticketing system, but it does have the core of a decent ticket system there. Plus it gives the support desk access to the previous history from the sales staff.
Support Forums: Nothing increases customer confidence in your company like the ability to get fast and accurate answers. No matter how high you staff your office there are always going to be cases where all your operatives are busy. Providing your customer with a secondary means of support can help to mitigate this circumstance. By having a forum available for customer support, not only do you give your customers the option of looking to other resources for support you also open up your support so that your customers can help each other. Using a customer support forum your customers can search through previous problems experienced and picking out relevant answers to help them. In truth most companies tend to have their staff running the forum, providing fast answers to the questions raised by their customers.
Be Reachable: The last recommendation I have for you is to make it easy for your clients to contact you. Firstly if at all possible don’t make it so that your customers have to punch in something resembling a console game cheat code to reach your support desk. Instead of a computerised answering system, have a receptionist, let them answer the calls and route them as needed. Yes it might be more costly than a computerised answering machine but it’s worth it to give the customer that feeling that they matter to you. Have generic email addresses, email addresses that your clients can use to access the relevant departments, once you have these addresses set up make sure they are monitored (even if that means making them forward automatically to all the members of that department., see my soon to be added post on using Outlook to man a support desk). The easier you are to reach the more a client will come to appreciate you.
The key to improving your customer retention is to make the customer feel that they matter to your business, make them believe that they are more than just a number to you, even if in fact they are not. What other suggestions do you have for improving customer retention?