You can’t build a successful business without happy customers. After all, while having one-time customers is fine, ultimately you can’t rely on individual customers all the time. To find long-term success, you must make your customers happy and ensure that people are coming back time and time again.
And if they’re happy, then that’s just what they’ll do. Working to ensure your customers are fully satisfied requires a multi-pronged approach that encompasses many facets of your business, including providing outstanding customer service and developing as an organization. We’ll look at some smart, often underrated ways to keep a smile on the faces of your customers.
Four smart ways to make your customers happy:
1. Offer Rewards
Many businesses offer introductory deals to their new customers and forget about giving the same to their existing customers. While you can see why businesses do this, you couldn’t blame the customer for feeling like they’ve been taken for granted.
For some types of businesses, it’s best to offer more rewards to your existing customers than your new ones, not less. Offering early access to new products, free trials, random discount codes, and other unexpected bonuses is a surefire way to keep your customers from looking at your competitors.
2. Provide Flexible Payment Options
It’s not just about getting your existing customers to make a purchase. It’s about making sure that they’re happy to make a purchase. If they’re hitting the ‘pay now’ button through gritted teeth, then they’ll be a customer, sure, but not a happy one. At that point, it won’t take much for your customer to begin looking at alternative businesses to buy from.
One way to increase your customers’ happiness levels is to provide flexible payment options. There are alternative financing solutions that allow your customers to pay their preferred way, such as in installments, while still ensuring that you get paid upfront. It’s a solution that works for everyone, and it might just mean that you get to keep a customer onboard.
3. Create a Bank of Knowledge
Creating a bank of knowledge relating to your products/service/industry has two benefits — it can reduce the workload for your customer service team, since many of the questions they’ll answer will be available on your website, and it can help your customers get the most from their purchase. It’ll also help to build your authority, which will give your customers peace of mind that they’re buying from a business that knows what they’re talking about.
4. Take a Proactive Approach to Problem Solving
Every business, even the most beloved ones, receives complaints from time to time. You won’t automatically lose a customer just because they’ve had a less-than-perfect experience. However, you will lose a customer if you don’t turn their unhappiness into happiness. The key to make your customers happy is to take a proactive approach to problem-solving, which means taking action as soon as you become aware of a problem. Unless the customer has had an absolute disaster of an issue, it’ll always be possible to bring them back into the fold — customers don’t expect perfection, just that businesses strive for it.
