Tips for keeping your customers happy (Collaborative blog)

Running a successful business involves various components and one of those is keeping your customers happy. When your customers are happy, they are likely to leave positive feedback, they will potentially come back to you when they require your services again and will recommend you when they know someone requires what you do. 

No matter your business, whether it’s a recycling company, a fitness enterprise or a marketing firm, you will always be dealing with customers in some way, whether that’s B2B (business-to-business) or B2C (business-to-consumer), so it’s important you have them at the forefront of your mind. 

To keep them happy, you can offer rewards for loyalty, you can provide excellent customer service, and ensure your services are better than your competitors - for example, a good order management for waste haulers (such as https://www.curbwaste.com/features/order-management-for-waste-haulers) or a live delivery tracker for a takeaway establishment. 

Below we look into five tips for keeping your customers happy. 

Reward Loyalty 

An easy way to keep your customers happy and to encourage them to continue to use you is to reward their loyalty. Depending on what your services are, you can reward return customers with a gift voucher, you can do a prize draw or you can have a loyalty scheme where x amount of purchase they get the next one free. When customers feel like they are being looked after, they will pay a little more for your services, if they deem your services worthwhile. 

Provide excellent customer service 

Good customer service is key to a successful business. The better your customer feels looked after, the more they will appreciate what you offer. Provide them with a bad experience and they will be quick to leave and not shop with you again. Often bad customer service will end up on review sites as it's a way a customer can vent their frustration. If you are organised within your workforce, this often helps your employees provide a better service to your customers. 

Use the best technology 

Technology plays a big part in the overall experience your customers have. New tech enables you to communicate with them quicker, provide better solutions to problems as well as impress them, with a better experience. Think about the tech you use in your business and see if there are ways to improve it, which will benefit your customers. An example is a live chat on a website so that customers can ask questions. Another example is adding interactive displays to your stores if you own a shop. 

Ask for feedback and make changes 

If you want to keep your customers completely satisfied, then you need to know the things they didn’t think you did great at. Ask all your customers for feedback through surveys or by following up with a call. By asking for feedback, you can listen to what they have to say and adapt your practices taking into account what they have said. There may be areas of your business that you think you excel at but in actual fact, your customers don’t like it at all. If you have a large email marketing list, you can sign up for a survey site and send one out to your list. If you want a bigger response, some companies will offer a small voucher to say thank you for completing. Alternatively, you could run a competition for the people who enter. 

Be transparent 

Transparency can really make a difference in a customer's experience. Many companies try to hide things, such as having hidden costs, as they don’t want to disclose them straight away, due to the fear of the customer not wanting to use them. By being transparent, customers will appreciate your honesty and it will build up trust. It can take a long time to build trust but one action to lose it completely. 

These are just a touch on the many ways you can keep your customers happy and improve how your business operates. See if any of the points can be applied now and consider making some long-term changes to ensure you offer the best services possible. You may already offer a great customer experience, but you never want to settle, instead, keep trying to develop and better yourself. 

What tips would you recommend for keeping your customers happy? Which of the above tips do you think are most useful? Is there anything missing in our guide that you think we should be adding? Let us know in the comment box below, we look forward to hearing from you.