What Do Customers Want Most From Your Business?
Do you want your business to be a great success? If so, then you should need to ask and answer one question:
What do customers want the most?
There’s no simple answer to this question because the wants and desires of customers are wide and varied. Let’s explore some of the key factors you should consider.
Immediate Answers
The first thing customers desperately want from any business they buy from is immediate answers or responses to the questions they have. The questions could be anything from when will the product be delivered to what pricing options are available. It’s important to provide immediate levels of online engagement where possible and that’s simple. All you need to do is set up a live chat on your website. This can be an automated response system or it might ultimately put clients in contact with a member of your team. Research shows that this is preferred to similar phone response solutions.
Fair Prices
Another point to consider if you want to keep customers happy is your pricing. You need to make sure that your pricing is fair and that you are not overcharging your clients or customers. They will punish you for this type of behavior and may abandon your business in favor of key competitors. To avoid a situation like this, you should make sure that you do explore what price points your competitors are using so you can match them. However, you should be careful to avoid cutting too much off the top. This can lead to a price war and that won’t benefit anyone.
User Friendly Options
Next, you need to make sure that you are providing customers with user friendly options. All aspects of your business should be user-friendly and designed specifically with customers in mind. One of the ways that you can do this is by ensuring that you provide online booking options through your website. This can be used with point of rental software if your business is based on allowing people to rent items or products rather than buying them. Of course, a booking system could be useful for a variety of business models and will save customers a lot of hassle.
Plenty Of Choices
Choice is key if you want to run a business that impresses customers and clients. If you offer customers plenty of choices, you can make sure that they are always interested in reutrning to your company. A key fact about choices is that it helps you reduce the number of missed sales. A common reason for missed sales is that the choice a customer wanted wasn’t available. For instance, you need to ensure that you are giving customers multiple different ways to buy products or services.
Review Responses
It’s not a smart idea to ignore any negative reviews accumulated by your business online. Negative reviews are dangerous because they can lead to bad word of mouth. Don’t forget that more than 80% of customers will check reviews online before committing to the purchase of a product or service. As such, it is in your best interest to respond to reviews. There are two reasons you should do this. First, it shows that you are listening to any complaints about your business. Perhaps more importantly, it allows you to essentially tell your side of the story. This can mitigate some of the damage of a particularly negative review.
Online Engagement
High levels of online engagement are another strong desire from customers and clients. They want to interact with companies and brands that they buy from online. However, they also want to do this on their terms. This means it can’t be intrusive. If you’re too intrusive, then customers are going to avoid your company like the plague. The best way to handle this is by utilising social media as a powerful marketing engagement tool. You can use social media to provide updates on your business or perhaps ask them direct questions.
Real Value
It’s important to provide your customers and clients with real value. Most business owners assume this means cost savings which is part of it but certainly not the full story. There are lots of ways that you can provide additional levels of value to customers. For instance, you might want to think about offering content to your customers. Powerful, engaging or useful content can be classified as highly valuable by clients and customers. That’s why it is worth considering setting up a blog for your business. This will allow you to easily add plenty of content that your customers can quickly peruse.
Security
Next, you should consider aspects of security in your business model. By getting security standards right, you can make sure that you are not leaving your business customers or clients vulnerable. Security has become a hot topic for every type of customer in virtually every industry. As such, it’s important to make sure that you are not falling short here. It’s unlikely that customers will forgive your business if their personal information or data does fall into the wrong hands. Don’t forget, this can always be traced back to a failure by your business eventually. This has been shown countless times in the media.
Great Deliveries
Finally, it’s worth noting that if you do get bad reviews from your customers then the majority of the time it’s going to have something to do with deliveries. If you don’t get deliveries right, then customers are going to be irritated and annoyed. One of the ways that you can fail with deliveries is by choosing the wrong outsourcing solution. As such, you need to make sure that you are checking any outsourcing service that you use carefully. It’s essentially that they will provide the standard of service that your customers demand and expect.
We hope this helps you understand some of the things that your customers need from your business. By fulfilling these demands, you can ensure that your business does come out on top on the market and doesn’t fall short of client expectations.
Categories: Outside Contributors
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