As a small, local business, having a solid customer management strategy is key to reaching and maintaining success.
Now more than ever, companies are realizing the importance of customer retention and satisfaction. Not only does it cost over five times more to gain a new customer than retain one, but studies show that about 87% of people read online reviews for local businesses.
So, the bottom line is you need to create a great customer experience each time a lead or returning customer walks through your storefront, visits your website, or books your services. Fortunately, with the six customer management strategies below, you'll be on your way to ensuring a positive customer journey from start to finish.
It's nearly impossible to keep track of all your customers without using a customer relationship management system (CRM). A CRM should be the foundation of your customer management strategy because it can help monitor your interactions with customers.
Plus, it stores all of their data including:
For instance, with GoSite's CRM tool, you can see text and chat messages you've had with customers, past bookings, and more. This can help you send tailored deals, promotions, and reminders for upcoming services. If you're ready to improve your customer's digital experience, try GoSite for free for 14 days.
It also enables you to reschedule appointments and create contact groups. In today's highly digital world, a cloud-based CRM is vital because it allows you to access your database from anywhere using any device.
Being a small business is a major benefit when it comes to managing your CRM. As you're both part of the same community, you most likely have close relationships with your customers—allowing you to keep personalized notes and records of most of them.
However, this doesn't mean data hygiene isn't essential for customer management. You can ensure the integrity of your customer data by creating a process that involves:
Whoever has access to the CRM should understand how to look up customers before inserting a new entry. This will help avoid duplication. If a customer is already found in the database, they can cross-reference the contact information and update it if necessary.
Social media is the perfect playground for getting acquainted with your customers. This is where people go to connect with one another on a casual note.
It's non-businessy, which makes it ideal for building meaningful relationships with customers in fun and creative ways.
For example, you can ask customers to like and follow your business page on Facebook and Instagram. Share posts that are helpful, insightful, and entertaining. And ask followers to share photos of products they've purchased or services they've booked with you to build user-generated content for your own channels.
But most importantly, you need to ensure you're engaging with them. You can do this by starting and joining in conversations in relevant groups and posts. The more you engage with customers, the more familiar—and loyal—customers are likely to become.
If you take your conversations off social media to chat or text, be sure to do it through your customer management system.
Consumers today aren't just looking for quality at a low price. They're looking to shop with businesses that offer a stellar customer experience.
You can do this online and offline. For instance, you can fix up your storefront, office, or restaurant, so it's more appealing and offers a pleasant atmosphere.
Then online, use your site to provide a seamless customer journey with website features that encourage visitors to self-serve and scheduling software for business.
Use digital content to personalize your interactions. One example is to send special promotions based on the products or services the customer purchased before. If you're using email marketing to stay connected with customers, then segmented campaigns are crucial for personalization.
Just about everyone's walking around with a mobile device. So why not implement a mobile marketing strategy to stay connected with your customers?
If you adopt a cloud-based customer management system, you'll be able to do this fairly easily. Now, what's great about mobile interactions is that it's personal and effective.
You can use these messages to remind customers of their upcoming appointments, send them texts on their birthday, or share tips that are relevant to your products and services.
The ultimate customer management strategy for building strong, lasting relationships is to listen to customer feedback. The better you accommodate to your customers' needs, the higher your chances of boosting your retention rates.
This may come through direct feedback from a phone call, chat, or email. Or it may occur indirectly through an online review. The feedback may be positive or negative, but both offer insights into how you can improve your business.
If a customer is complaining about a legitimate issue—find ways to fix it. If a customer praises a certain aspect of your business, find ways to amplify it by sharing it on your channels.
Finally, you'll want to put these strategies and tips to work. Get together with your team to determine what's feasible for your business, a timeline, and goals.
As you try these out, be sure to have a process in place to monitor, store, and analyze results. This will help you make changes or improvements to your strategy as you go. If you're ready to automate client communications, payments, review requests, and more with a single platform, be sure to give GoSite a try for free.