5 Ways to Keep Customers Coming Back

Whether you believe the customer is always right or not so much, there is no denying that customers are necessary in business. Therefore, it is critical to maintain good relationships with your customers and potential customers. This is a good ethic to have, but in practice, it can be challenging. Customers want to vent, get answers, talk to live humans, find solutions and more.

Because customers can be so demanding, it is essential to have an infrastructure established that can handle their needs. In the past, that meant staff and long hours. Today it can be better managed with CRM for customer service. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and instead of staffing your own CRM in house, there are services now, where you can outsource effectively, efficiently and inexpensively. CRM can help you keep your customers coming back in these five ways.

1. Ease of Access Matters

In order to keep a customer, it is essential that they can easily access you on their terms and schedule. Having in-house staff on-site and ready to help customers 24/7 is either expensive or unrealistic.

This is where an effective CRM for customer service can be valuable. CRMs keep your business open while you sleep or are away and satisfy customer inquiries. Not only is this effective, it is usually a lot less expensive than paying someone by the hour to man the phones all day, every day.

2. Speak the Customer’s Language

Speaking your customer’s language is very important. This doesn’t mean the actual language, like English or Spanish, although that helps too. It is important to be able to communicate at the level of understanding the customer is equipped with. Talking over their heads or in technical language can create a sense of alienation.

When dealing with customers, it is important to communicate on their level. It is tempting to use jargon or industry language, but that is usually ineffective. With a well setup CRM account, you can assure your customers are spoken to in vernacular they can understand. This helps them maintain a positive perception of your company and better assures their repeat business.

3. Take Responsibility

People often don’t want to admit mistakes or own up to problems. This can create frustration and alienation with your customers. Customers who experience businesses who don’t take responsibility often feel like the company is blaming them for their issue. This is not a good way to maintain customer loyalty. Customers appreciate it when a company owns their mistakes and takes responsibility for them. When you take responsibility for a problem a customer has, it creates a feeling of satisfaction not only because their grievance was solved but a sense that they were heard was also created. This makes customers feel valued and likely to return and promote your business. Conversely, an angry customer is a walking advertisement for your competition. You don’t want to give your competitors free, non-stop advertising.

4. Pay Attention

Often, businesses become oblivious to their customers’ concerns. But as Yogi Berra said, "You can observe a lot by watching." and taking that farther, you can hear a lot by listening. Customers are often indirect with their complaints and issues. It is important to hear what they are saying, even if they aren’t saying it articulately. This requires a sincere desire to understand.

Having well trained people who are invested in the art of listening is valuable to your company and helpful to maintaining good customer relations. Make sure your company has an infrastructure to hear customer demands as well as take actions to satisfy those demands.

5. Contact

Use engagement from a customer as an opportunity to learn more from them. Document what they say. Ask for feedback. Offer surveys. These steps can keep you out in front of potential issues as well as better inform your business as to how it can improve. This can not only keep customers but help attract new ones.

Also, this is a good way to create a database of your customers, so you can send out communications, ask for additional feedback and promote items within your business. Remember, contact is a two-way street. They must be able to contact you and if you can contact them, you have an advantage.

Conclusion

With more and more people working online, and a less than standard workweek, people expect more and more that they will have universal access to the businesses they need to contact. It is important to provide this ability because it is cheaper and easier to maintain good customer relations than it is to attract new customers, especially if your company has a reputation for bad customer service. Sometimes your business’s best ability is its availability. So stay open, listen and use the opportunity provided by round the clock service to improve your brand and reputation.

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Mark enjoys writing, editing and ranking keywords in search engines. He has been writing and promoting his blogs in the past ten years.