3 Ways to Improve Your Relationship With Your Customers
There are numerous obstacles that stand between small business owners and long term success. However, the most important element therein is the customer. What could be more important, for better or worse, than the people to whom you intend to market and sell your products and/or services? Taking care of your customers may be basic, but it can also be counterintuitive to many who see them only as resources to mined. Here’s what you need to know about prioritizing the customer experience for your business.
Technology
In an increasingly online world, it’s no surprise that there are a variety of technological solutions to the problems associated with customer engagement. Products such as Experience Cloud can help to address these issues holistically, but there are also a variety of tools that can be used to address specific problems. For example, creating an app for your customers can help them engage with your products and services on their own terms, and that convenience is a powerful motivator. It enables users to make a purchase anytime and anywhere, all but eliminating the risk that you’ll lose out on a sale because of inconvenience. Creating these apps has never been quicker or more affordable thanks to APIs. However, this brings to mind another crucial way for you to appeal to your customers.
Cybersecurity
The APIs that allow you to quickly and cost effectively produce an app for your customers to use for their convenience can also constitute a major cybersecurity risk if left alone. These APIs are essentially just as available to hackers as they are to your business, and that can allow hackers to reverse engineer apps made with a certain API, and that can allow them to exploit otherwise obscure weaknesses in the code. Addressing this is therefore a crucial way for you to protect your customers from data or identity theft. Likewise, your company’s website, by default, is lacking a pretty crucial cybersecurity feature that can put you and your customers at risk. An unsecure website is open to data theft and malware, so you’ll need to spring for some SSL certification in order to protect yourself and your customers via encryption and decryption.
On the plus side, this will also help your website to be more visible on search engines, because those search engines have taken it upon themselves to protect users by prioritizing secure websites in search results. This means that your company will be more visible and more accessible by virtue of putting its customers first.
Rapport
In addition to providing convenience and safety online, you’ll also need to interact with customers in person, and that demands an entirely different set of considerations. People skills are an essential part of customer service, and your staff needs to be trained as such. However, that training needs to be devised by people who are themselves skilled at interacting amicably with customers, so you’ll need to get your hands dirty in order to hone your own social skills. There are a variety of courses that you can take to prepare yourself to deal directly with your customers, and other courses like public speaking can help you overcome any “stage fright” that might detract from your performance in a social situation. While these precautions may seem frivolous, it will pay dividends, because an amicable interaction with a local cashier will necessarily translate directly into an increase in brand loyalty, one of the most important factors in a business’s long term health.
There will be numerous obstacles between you and your business’s lasting presence. However, appealing to your customers doesn’t have to be one of them. It will take some work to make your customers feel at home, but these tips can help you prioritize those interactions from the ground up. By providing consumers more tools with which to patronize your business, the online safety in which to do so, and some pleasant facetime will go a long way toward your business becoming an indispensable part of your customers’ daily lives.
