How To Keep Customers Coming Back

Your marketing team has created just the right strategy to brand and engage prospective clients. This new increased interest in your products or services is now frantically handled by your sales person or team and is being lead down the sales funnel to becoming a client. At this stage it’s very important how you handle this new found client as it sets the stage for future relations with the client.

Most businesses are overly focused on gaining a client, which is rightly so but fail to put the same effort into handling and keeping the client. Your marketing and sales efforts should lead to an efficient operation of processing the product or service deliverable to the client. The better a company handles this portion of their operations, the better the client relations and reduced cost of handling future business. Remember it’s cheaper to keep a client than to find a new one.

Let’s take a high level look at the top three areas to focus on to building supportive operations.

Customer On-Boarding:

This actually starts happening at the sales stage by your sales person. If not done correctly, your client will be confused as to the next stage and will hesitate in completing the transaction. Some things to consider here are:

• Has the sales person done a good job of explaining how the service or product will get into the hands of the client?
• Do we need a dedicated team to bring clients on-board?
• What information and paperwork needs to be processed in order to move onto the next stage?
• How easily can the client make payment for the transaction?
• What administrative controls need to be setup for other departments or business functions?

Delivery of Product / Service:

The delivery of the product or service is critical to completing the transaction and keeping the client. It may take the efforts of several departments to achieve this. When developing Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for delivery, consider the following:

• Does the department have all the correct information from the on-boarding stage to deliver as promised?
• Is there enough quantity of product on hand to fulfil the order or do we have enough staff to deliver the service?
• Are the delivery methods to providing the products or services adequate with the proper quality controls in place?

On-going Customer Service:

The worst thing any company can do is to not provide the best customer experience possible for their clients. The sales and operational departments must work together to maintain a high and always positive experience. You have to ask yourself.

• Customer follow-up for satisfaction of product or service delivery. How will this be done?
• Clients calling during the transaction
• How do you handle customer product returns or low levels of satisfaction with service performed?

There are other areas of consideration to look at in order to have a completely efficient and supportive structure that maintains a positive customer experience for repeat business. It’s always a good idea to put yourself in your customer’s shoes when creating your Value Stream Mappings (VSM) or client support processes. Many companies promise the world to the client but fail to deliver as promised. Don’t let your operations fail to deliver on that promise. Your reputation and any future business are on the line.

Let us show you how to keep your customers coming back for more.