Tag: Businesses

The One Place Businesses Should Never Skimp: Customer Service

If you’re running a business, customer service is the one place where you shouldn’t be cutting corners.
Why? Because it’s easy to feel like customer services are the afterthought. After all, it’s not the part of your business that makes money—it’s the part that handles everything else. But while it may not be a direct revenue generator, good customer services can have a huge impact on your bottom line.

Here are the reasons why:

• It is about building trust. Sometimes we think about trust as being built by how much information we share with our customers—how much we tell them about ourselves and what we do. But actually, trust is built by how willing you are to listen to them, respond to their questions, and go above and beyond for them when they need it most. That kind of commitment goes a long way toward building loyalty in the long term.
• It is about helping people solve problems. When someone has a problem with something that you’ve created or sold them—whether it’s an app or an appliance—it can feel like a major inconvenience for both parties involved.

It may seem like an obvious answer, but if you’re not careful, it’s easy to slip into the habit of thinking of customer services as secondary concern. You know that you need to have good customer services, but how do you make sure your business has the best possible service?

Customer Services: How to Provide the Best One

First and foremost: Stop thinking about customer service in terms of call centers or automated systems. These things can be helpful in certain situations, but they’re no substitute for a real human being who cares about your business and its customers.
Next: Make sure all of your employees are trained on how to provide excellent customer services! Make sure they’re aware of what kind of information customers want and how to give it to them. Don’t forget that just because someone asks for something doesn’t mean they actually want that thing—make sure your employees are equipped with tools for dealing with people who might be angry or upset about something!
Finally: Stay vigilant about ensuring that every interaction you have is pleasant and helpful for both parties involved.

It’s crucial to remember that it’s not just about the product or service you provide—it’s also about how you treat your customers. They’re the ones who will make or break your business, and they deserve to be treated with respect and professionalism.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

No Business Can Survive And Thrive Without Great Marketing

A business in a bubble or vacuum will fail. The nature of business is that it’s wholly dependent on the patronage and awareness of its customers. As soon as it’s cut-off from its patrons, it will end up eating itself and die. It takes a lot of capital to keep a business rolling and those losses need to get recouped!

You need to make sales, even if it’s as simple as putting up a lemonade or hotdog stand near a place where many passersby converge. You also need to market yourself if your business is any bigger than a stand.

Customers are the Food and Marketing is the Restaurant

It’s true though. No business can survive and thrive without great marketing. Mediocre marketing or bad marketing can kill a business because marketing is inherently expensive and if you can’t recoup that expense with profits, your business won’t survive!

• What Happens When You Don’t Market Your Business: If you don’t market your business on anything—posters, print ads, online banner ads, TV commercials, YouTube ads, word of mouth, and so forth—you might as well shut the doors to your company. If your company sells products and no one is there to hear about it, it might as well not have.

• Popular Brands Usually Don’t Become Popular by Accident: Apple Computers didn’t become popular by accident. It took decades of marketing, hard work, dedication, and a loyal consumer base for people to relate the bitten apple logo to computers instead of some sort of farming company.

• Most Businesses Struggle in Taking a Market Share: Most startup businesses don’t get as lucky as the megacorps that dominate their arena. It’s like in boxing—for every Floyd Mayweather Jr. or Manny Pacquiao, there are ham-and-egger journeymen out there that require branding and marketing to survive and take their minute share of the market.

• Walk-Ins and Word-of-Mouth Have Limited Reach: You can survive on walk-ins and word-of-mouth recommendations as long as you’re willing to keep your business small. It can also work in major businesses like real estate, but those hinge on commissions that number the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most businesses require constant attention.

• The Nature of Marketing Explained: Marketing your company is part of the equation to making it successful. You don’t even need to necessarily make the absolute best products or services available—marketing, advertising, and promotion helps you find customers interested in buying your specific brand or type of product, even if they’re just a niche market.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail