Keeping your customers depends heavily on your communication skills. Here are a few simple but highly effective tips to help you improve customer relationships.
It doesn’t matter how spectacular your product is; if you can’t communicate with your customers, you will lose them.
Your customers aren’t just a number or a hindrance. Just like you, they are real people who are looking to buy a product. Hopefully, they want your product. If not, they have other options.
Keeping your customers depends heavily on your communication skills. Here are a few simple but highly effective tips to help you improve customer relationships.
1. Always respond ASAP
How fast you reply to a customer can make or break their experience. The slower the response, the deeper their frustration. We’re now at a point where people expect to talk to a representative within minutes. Anything longer than that is all it takes for a negative review to pop up for the business.
While a business may be open 9 to 5, if they’re smart, they’ll have customer service representatives available outside that eight-hour bracket. Many well-known companies, such as Amazon, offer the ability to talk to a real person at any time, 24 hours a day.
You don’t have to resolve the issue immediately. It’s not always possible as a business owner. But it only takes a couple seconds to inform the customer that they’ve been heard. They’ll appreciate the response that their inquiry is moving towards a solution.
2. Be human
People like to do business with people. Think about the last time you called a company when you had a problem with their product or service. The robotic voice on the other end wasn’t necessarily obnoxious but didn’t it feel like you were wasting your time? Didn’t you want to mash zero until a real person answered?
As efficient as robots and artificial intelligence (AI) are, they can’t form an emotional connection. But you can. You can get to know your customer, chat with them, learn about their grievances, and build a customized experience for them. AI is a tool to help, but it’s not a replacement for real, personal conversations.
3. Show them the future
When people buy a product or service from you, they want to feel secure about the purchase. Shame, guilt, worry, and doubt shouldn’t ever cross their mind. The simplest way to reassure a customer is by gaining their trust.
You’ve many ways to build trust between a customer and your business, such as showing proof of concept, showcasing testimonials from big or trustworthy names, but you can also show your products roadmap.
A website called Appsumo does something similar. How it works is that Appsumo teams up with business owners (typically startups) who provide a great deal on their product. But when customers are iffy about buying, they ask for a roadmap. Essentially, an outline of future updates with tentative deadlines.
The customers want to know that once they buy the product, the company isn’t going to take their money and flee. Seeing the roadmap, including the steps to get there, reassures the customer. They begin to trust the company and happily make their purchase. Why not consider doing something similar for customers who are on the fence?
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
