How To Avoid Sabotaging Your Profitability With Better Customer Care

The only way to be successful as a business is to offer customers excellent service. When you have a loyal and happy customer base, then your business can expand, and you can finally get the traction in the marketplace that you want.

Research from Zendesk suggests that when customers have a pleasant experience with your firm, 87 percent of them share it with their network. And when they have a bad experience, 95 percent tell other people about it.

Your incentive, therefore, is to ensure that you offer a good service, both for the peer-to-peer advertising and to avoid damage to your reputation. But how?

Offer Faster Delivery

If you operate an online retail store, or even if you just want to get a product in stock quickly for a customer, then offering fast delivery can give you a competitive edge. While most companies will opt for first-class post or next day delivery, you can do something better by using a same day courier. These services collect your goods and deliver them to wherever you need them to be, all within a few hours.

Be Accommodating

If you’ve ever watched TV programs about the lifestyles of the rich and famous, you’ll have noticed something: all of the firms that serve them are extremely accommodating. Hotels will fly in special food for guests to eat, restaurants will clear out their entire premises: everybody bends over backward to please.

Regular businesses don’t offer this level of service, but they should. Customers aren’t used to a high level of service, and so if you provide it, you’ll immediately stand out from the competition.

Make Customer Service A Part Of Your Mission Statement

Some of the most successful companies in the world are customer-focused. Apple, for instance, puts the customer experience at the top of its pyramid of priorities, with the product often playing second fiddle. What matters is how a company makes a person feel, rather than what it produces.

One of the best ways to ensure that customer experience becomes a priority in your organization is to incorporate it into your mission statement. When employees see that it's your mission, they’re more likely to take personal responsibility for how customers feel and consider that during daily decision-making.

Prioritize Customer Satisfaction Over Growth

The reason companies grow is because they provide customers with a service they love. But growing rapidly presents many challenges that can harm the customer experience. Companies that prioritize growth over customer happiness often fall on their sword, failing to maintain the momentum which created the need to grow in the first place.

When you look at some of the most successful companies in the world, they grew in a measured way. Their priority was never growth for growth’s sake, but to ensure that their customer base was happy, even if that meant turning some people away. Bespoke brands, in particular, need to be careful about how fast they grow, just in case they end up wrecking the one thing that gives them value: the quality of their customer service.