By Andrew Oziemblo, Founder & CEO of Chicago SEO Geeks, the digital marketing & SEO agency helping businesses achieve long-term growth goals.
One thing that all businesses strive for is a loyal consumer base. Loyal consumers matter because they ensure repeat business and they become advocates for your brand too, recommending it to other people. Therefore, let’s take a look at some of the different ways to harvest loyal relationships with customers.
Engage on social media
Social media represents an excellent opportunity for companies today. It’s not just about posting an endless array of promotional messages. You also need to make sure that you engage with your customers. If you post advertising for your products and services on a continual basis, you’re only going to annoy people. Instead, as any good SEO agency will tell you, social media is all about engaging with people and building connections.
Social media is where you can build strong relationships. You need to begin by figuring out where your consumer base is online. What social media networks are they using? You need to conduct research to find this out. You then need to connect with your social media followers on topics you both find interesting. You can also use social media as a platform for answering consumer questions and delivering exceptional customer service, which is something we will discuss in more depth in the next section.
Improving customer service
Any business owner understands the importance of customer service. After all, without your customers, your business is nothing. However, providing exceptional customer service is often a lot easier said than done. It takes time, money, and a lot of effort. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the easy ways you can improve customer service at your business…
- Get your employees behind you – One of the best ways to improve your level of customer service is to get your staff behind you. If any type of culture change is to happen within your company, it is imperative that your staff are on board. If they aren’t, you are never going to be able to provide your customers with the level of service they should receive.
- Add a personal touch – A lot of business owners tend to overlook the little things. However, it is the little things that are going to be remembered, and it is the little things that are going to get your business reserved. A little bit of effort can go a very long way.
- Research your competition – In order for your business to stand out from the crowd in the customer service arena, you need to understand the competition. You need to know what you are up against. This involves discovering where your competition is going wrong and where they are getting it right. Never simply copy the competition, though. Learn from what they are getting right, and adapt it to suit your company.
- Reward loyalty with loyalty – How do you expect your customers to be loyal to you if you are not loyal to them? You should not only reward new customers. You need to reward existing customers too so that you can build up a loyal consumer base.
- Talk to your customers – You need to make an effort to talk to your customers and get to know them. If you don’t, how are you going to know what they want and need?
- Outsource – Last but not least, it can be incredibly difficult to handle all tasks in-house nowadays, and there is no need to. Outsourcing is a viable solution in a lot of cases. When it comes to customer service, you can make the most of expert virtual services so that you can enhance the service you provide to your consumers. While outsourcing will cost money, in a case like this, it will make your business more money. This means all of your telephone calls will be answered and handled professionally and efficiently.
Provide an outstanding user experience
Aside from the suggestions that have already been mentioned, you need to work with the SEO company you have hired in order to provide an outstanding user experience (UX). A lot of people think that SEO services are just about keywords and link building. However, this could not be further from the truth. User experience plays a massive role when it comes to your search engine ranking and the relationship you build with your consumers.
If you do not build a good user experience, how do you expect people to keep coming back to your website again and again? Even fans of your products are going to get annoyed if your website is difficult to use or slow to load. Therefore, providing a quality service is critical when it comes to maintaining and creating loyalty. You must make sure you create a website that ticks every single box. Security is pivotal here. You can put people’s minds at ease through the use of security badges, as well as payment security tools and implementing a number of identification tools as well.
Your choice of web host is also going to play a role when it comes to the experience that your website creates. This impacts both the security and the speed of your site. You need to make sure that navigation is effective and that people do not need to think twice when it comes to using your website. You also need to make sure your site is responsive and that it has been optimised for use on a smaller device.
Finally, make sure that you gather feedback about the performance of your site to make certain that you are providing an incredible user experience. This is something that you are going to need to address on a continual basis.
As you can see, there are many different ways you can improve customer service at your business without spending excessive amounts of money or taking up a lot of your time. Use the tips that have been provided above and you are bound to notice a positive difference.