If you want to help your business stand out from the crowd – you need to pay close attention to the level of customer service you provide in all aspects of your operations. With it becoming harder to compete on price or differentiate your business – one key way to retain customers and grow your client base is by providing an unforgettable customer experience. After all, finding a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
“Customer experience” covers everything your clients and guests do when they interact with your business. That means every single detail is important and nothing should be neglected – it all adds up to a big picture that says something either positive or negative about your business.
Providing a great customer experience is a must – and it’s not just to help your existing customers feel great about doing business with you. It’s also a hugely important marketing tool. When someone has a great experience with you, they’ll be much more likely to tell their friends and family. People put a lot of faith in the recommendations of someone they know, so if you can stand out from the crowd and provide the perfect customer experience, you could see your business grow.
The power of reviews
Now more than ever – what people say about your business is hugely important. With the growth of social media and online review sites, there are clear communication channels that give people a voice and a place to talk about your business. But you shouldn’t see this as a negative or something to be avoided – you can use it to your advantage.
By providing a great customer experience, you can set yourself apart and get to the top of these review sites. Not only that, but the more “likes”, “shares” and “comments” you receive on social media the more your existing customers will help do some of the marketing work for you. Consumers are four times more likely to purchase your product/service if they have seen a positive review from a friend. Moreover, these referred customers have a 16% higher lifetime value than regular customers, meaning they stay with you longer and spend more. This sort of marketing reach was previously unheard of, but now 70% of consumers read reviews via social media and it’s there for you to take advantage of.
Creating customer loyalty is hugely important for your business and it makes a single customer worth so much more than just one purchase. A great customer experience is one of the best ways to help grow a loyal customer base that continues to do business with you. If you’re not focused on customer loyalty at the moment, you should be, as increasing customer retention by 5% can lead to a 25% – 95% increase in profits for your business.
Why negative experiences are a huge problem
Hopefully, you’re starting to see how a good customer experience helps your business grow and could help to get you new customers. But there’s one thing that spreads faster than a good customer experience – and that’s a bad one. If someone has a complaint, they’ll normally be more likely to talk about it to people they know, in fact, 95% of consumers share bad experiences with other people.
What this means is that you’ve got to work extra hard to eliminate poor customer experiences and reasons for complaint. When someone does have a legitimate complaint – don’t ignore it, go above and beyond the call of duty to turn it into a positive.
You can turn that complaint into a positive by over-delivering. When you browse a company’s social media platforms and see people saying negative things, this is bad news for their marketing efforts. Especially if many of these complaints are ignored and left unanswered. Customer churn can increase by up to 15% if businesses fail to respond to customers over social media.
Don’t be a company that simply ignores negative reviews in the hopes they’ll go away. Be proactive and reach out to your unhappy customers. Address their concerns legitimately and thoughtfully and do everything you can to get them to return to your business. Whether that’s changing your processes, re-training staff, or simply sending them a box of chocolates. It’s little touches like that which give your unhappy customers something positive to tell people they know instead of negative.
The facts are simple, 58% of consumers will never use a company again after a negative experience, while 50% of consumers would use a company more frequently after a positive customer experience. Finally, 23% of customers who had a good customer experience will tell 10+ people, the decision should be obvious, invest time, effort and money in your customer experience and you will achieve great results.
How do you provide a great customer experience?
You need to have a clear set of processes to make sure you’re providing the best customer experience possible.
Firstly, let’s start with staff. You should hire staff with customer satisfaction in mind and look for potential candidates who have clearly shown a high level of friendly and professional customer service skills.
For those staff who are already in your business, you need to train and re-train to get them up to standard. With all your staff, walk through a clear customer service plan to make sure every step of a customer’s experience is fine-tuned, from the second they enter your business. And great customer service shouldn’t end when they step outside of your business either – make sure you’ve got great quality after-care.
Your customers want to feel valued. If anything, they want to feel like they aren’t customers at all, or at least forget for a while. Make sure you have this at the front of your mind when you design a process that looks after your customers. Treat them professionally, but also with a level of both efficiency and friendliness. You never want your customers to think they’re just being used to get a sale or taken for granted.
Choose the staff with the best phone-manners to take care of that part of the customer experience, while those who prefer to work face-to-face can do so when the customer is on board.
Make sure you don’t neglect your social media profiles. As we’ve looked at, these can be great marketing tools and they aren’t something you should leave as an afterthought. 30% of customers share positive reviews via social media, so create a great customer experience, then a place where people can share this. Provide a professional and engaging social media presence that lets people behind the scenes or offers them value (think discounts and exclusive offers), and you could see your business grow.
Go out and see what your rivals are doing. Look at some of the best customer service providers in your area and “borrow” their ideas. You don’t just have to check other in the property industry – you can use ideas from all sorts of businesses.
Get the basics down and don’t neglect them. Your premises should always be spotlessly clean, even if that means hiring additional cleaning staff. Do you want light background music? Think about the experience a customer has and fine-tune every aspect of their visit.
Have well-trained staff who’ve been hand-picked to provide the best customer service possible. Offer incentives to your staff to ensure they always have the customer as their number one priority.
Finally, mistakes. We all make a mistake now and again. A wise person once said, “you are not remembered by the mistake itself but by the way you dealt with it”. Embrace these. Use them as learning opportunities to improve and do better moving into the future.
If you can offer the best customer service in your area, it could go a long way to differentiate yourself from other businesses. Don’t just think of creating great customer service as something “you have to do”, look at it as an investment, 86% of consumers are willing to pay up to 25% more for a better customer experience. So, the outlay definitely is worth the result.
KIN Property cares about your customers and wants to make their experience as easy as possible. Purchasers trust us and feel comfortable sharing their settlement concerns, this openness allows us to help them to settle on time. If KIN is able to help your project settle, get in contact here.