How to be a profitable business - Customer Care

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Your business is something you have worked hard to create - you spend hours, days, weeks making it successful, but the profits don't seem to increase. Perhaps your profits are going somewhere but with the recent pandemic you are worried that less customers will come to you and invest in your service or your business products.In this series, we are sharing our top tips to help you continue to remain profitable, and the steps you can take to help encourage a successful business journey.

We are starting with the most important part of your business success - the clients! The client care in your business is essential. Your clients are at the heart of your business, as without them, your business will come to a quick and disastrous halt. You may feel that you are already ticking this box, but every business can improve customer care, no matter how much they are doing!

1. Set up client procedures for your whole team. What are the processes they must take to ensure a client feels loved from the start of their journey, and throughout the process of working with you? When you think about this in the eyes of your customer, what would you expect to receive? Are you doing these things? Think about the ways in which your team (and you!) should engage with customers, when contact needs to be made, and how it should be made. A conscious decision you should make is also to make sure that you are remaining engaged, but not overstepping - it's a thin line between engagement and becoming overbearing.
2. Start the process with a good script. We can all hear when a salesperson is calling us, and that's because the script is bad, or because the person on the other end has not practiced it. When you make a great script that is always open to changes based upon feedback, and when you have the members of staff that handle sales calls practice it - you will have a better experience all round for everyone!
3. Customer calls require dedicated and compassionate members of staff. You know your team, and you know which members of staff are the best with empathy, compassion, and support - these should be the client managers that you have within your team. They should be given the tools to help them build the relationships with your customers, so the team members that are more analytical and perhaps feel better working on the tasks at hand, can continue to do their work. Build a bridge between your business, your staff, and your customers, and your customers will continue to feel cherished and understood.
4. Take notes! All too often, businesses have team members that speak with staff who find out that client is perhaps on holiday during a specific month - but without taking notes on it, the business doesn't know not to contact them during that time. Take notes on each client, which can be seen by anyone associated with the client themselves. This can be from preferences in terms of contact procedures - do they prefer email, text, or call? If they have family members, this can be an excellent note to take, as when they are being spoken to, your staff can be reminded to ask about their newborn, or how their dog is doing. Things like these extra personal touches can truly make a huge difference to your customer experience.
5. Be there to listen to negative feedback. Without negative feedback, we cannot know where to improve, so you must be there when feedback is given for you to make changes. As a leader, you may not want to spend valuable time on the nitty gritty, but when a client has negative feedback to give, provide your insights, support, or time to that client or the staff member who is the client manager, so they know that you are truly listening. You can then consider the feedback, and if it is viable, make changes in alignment with it. With this feedback, you can and will bring a better customer journey for the next clients, and perhaps even convert your unhappy customer into a happy one!

We hope these 5 tips to make client care a priority for your business, and thus make it more profitable. What are your tips for other business owners around client care?