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One of the biggest factors that influence how your customers and target audience perceive your brand is customer service. It is more than just a part of your service or some thing that your customers come to expect. Customer service, if done well can end up really enhancing your brand perception and position your brand for success.
In this post, I list a few ways in which customer service can be used effectively as a brand strategy.
Your Complainers Are Your Best Customers
Complaining customers often get a bad rap. To employees, they can be difficult and unpleasant to deal with. To other customers, complainers ruin the experience for everyone else. And to business owners, complainants cost time and money that could be used for other things.
In reality, complainers are the best thing to happen to a business! Find out why in this article.
Reach Into Your Customers World View
Do you ever think of your customer’s world view? I am sure you do – either consciously or most often than not, unconsciously. In this article I would like to encourage you to think more consciously about your customer’s world view and how that would benefit your brand.
Any business thrives and succeeds when it can identify the right target market and then craft it’s brand message to fit that audience like a glove. Even if your product or service is top of the range, your brand and your bottom-line would suffer if your message and brand story does not cater to your target market’s world view. Therefore it is essential to understand and then craft your marketing message to the world view that makes sense to your customers and potential customers.
Find out more in this article.
Do Your Customers Like Your Brand?
What kind of attitude do your customers have towards your brand? Do they like your brand or dislike it? One could argue that if they are buying from us, they should like the brand. But in reality this is far from the truth. For most businesses, customers actually do not like their brand and have a distaste and yet continue to buy because of various factor such as convenience, lack of options and so on.
From time to time, as a responsible brand evangelist, you should attempt to find out the status of the attitude of your customers. A status check will enable you to see potential disasters. A negative brand attitude foreshadows an impending brand disaster.
Find our about the The Loud Butcher, The Lazy Salesperson and The Disgruntled Teller in this article.
When To Listen To A Customer?
Customer feedback is probably the most over-hyped part of modern business. That’s not to say it isn’t useful, however. It is: not only do you get valuable feedback on your services, you also get great insight on possible new products or upgrades to your brand.
But not all customer feedback is a golden road. In fact, sometimes it can lead you down the wrong path, and drive your business to failure instead of success. Read about all the factors that affect how useful customer feedback really is in this article.
How to Build A Customer-Focused Brand?
There are certain business concepts that are difficult to understand. Branding is one of these ideas. It is crucial to have a brand tailored specifically to your customers’ needs, but developing this brand can be easier said than done. While it is important to consult a branding professional when building your small business brand, you ultimately understand your business and your customers in a way that no outsider ever can.
Find out about the five steps to building a solid, customer-focused brand that your market won’t be able to resist in this article.
Guiding Customers To Information
I was recently searching Amazon, not for a book but for a specific discount that I had heard about. I entered the name in the search bar at the top of the page and pressed enter. A ‘no search engine’ page with recommended products came up immediately. I checked my spelling and checked the name of the discount; both were correct. I tried again and nothing came up.
I finally realized that the search bar at the top of every Amazon page does not allow you to search for information. It is for products only. This can be confusing and frustrating for customers, who may have to try several times before realizing their error. It is not unusual for a customer to need information on shipping, returns, and other policies, and they should be able to find these facts easily.
Read more and watch my video in this article.
Are Your Customers Working For You?
Although an e-commerce website owner technically works for his or herself, you may often feel that you work for your customers. Like a boss, they make demands that you must comply with and have a huge effect on your day-to-day life as well as the success of your business. However, your customers should also be working for you—helping you build your brand and your ecommerce business. Like any job, this requires training in order to perform effectively.
Educating Your Customers
When you think about your interactions with visitors to your e-commerce website, you usually think in terms of profit. However, educating your customers can be just as important. Search engines are more and more content-oriented, and so are our customers. You can make search engine bots and website visitors both happy by offering education in addition to a line of products and services.
Are You Thinking Like A Customer?
If you are having a hard time anticipating your customers’ needs and wants, it may be that something is holding you back from ‘getting inside their heads’. In order to deal most effectively (and most profitable) with customers, you need to think like one of them. Here are a few ideas for getting into the mind of your market:
- Communicate with employees.
- Visit your website.
- Deal with your customer service.
- Join your email list.
- Visit the competition.
Read about all these ideas in detail in this article.
Keep Your Female Customers Coming Back
According to an oft-quoted story, famed psychiatrist Sigmund Freud was once asked if there were a branch of the mind that he didn’t understand. He replied: The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”
Freud should have asked the shopkeeper next door. Business owners who market to women must answer this question correctly almost every day. Find out about a few tips for creating a small businesses experience that will keep female customers coming back in this article.
5 Ways To Build Customer Loyalty
How would you feel about having a loyal, dependable group of customers who always turn to your business first? Customer loyalty is one very important key to business success. Loyal customers will pay a little more, follow you through almost any transition, and create the word-of-mouth buzz that will keep your business hopping. It’s easy to see how a dedicated customer base can help any small business, but sometimes not so easy to see how you can build one of your own.
Find out the details of the 5 ways to build customer loyalty in this article.
Customer Service The E-commerce Way
There used to be a huge divide between ‘online shopping’ and ‘customer service’. Most consumers expected to trade great service and brand interaction for the convenience and lower prices available on the internet. However, as online shopping becomes more common, expectations are changing. While customer service is not the same in ecommerce websites as it is in a physical store location, it is nonetheless possible and even mandatory.
