Guest author Jason Phillips serves up some small biz advice.
As a small business you face no more important concern than your customer’s happiness. Customer happiness provides you with perhaps the most powerful advantage you hold over larger businesses, especially national chains.
After all, large businesses place other qualities to the forefront, qualities you’re incapable of matching. Your restaurant will never offer the convenience of the McDonald’s chain, and your retail store will never offer the prices of Wal Mart. For these large businesses, customer happiness represents nothing more than lip service. In fact, the larger the business, the more its customers expect poor service, and the larger the business, the less their low quality of customer service impacts their bottom line.
Of course, just as much as customers expect poor service from large national chains, they also expect a high level of happiness when shopping at small businesses. In fact, if any single mistake will cost your small business customers, it’s making your customers feel like they simply don’t matter to you.
What Customers Want from Small Businesses
Different customers will vocalize their expectations through unique language, but at a very core level, customer happiness hinges on a single quality- appreciation.
You see, your customers give up some of their rational interest to patronize your business. They choose to eschew the convenience offered by large businesses and they elect to spend more money than they need to just so they can support your enterprise. In other words, when customers choose to shop from your small business they choose to make a few sacrifices to support your vision.
And your customers want you to acknowledge these sacrifices.
Demonstrating Active Appreciation
You cannot ASSUME your customers understand how much you appreciate their business. Instead, you need to take concrete actions to demonstrate your appreciation.
Here are a few low cost, high-impact ways to keep your small business’ customers happy:
- Send “Thank You” notes to your customers after they’ve made a purchase from your business. Or better yet, send out holiday-the medpostcards to your customers a couple times a year. Joe Girard, perhaps the greatest car salesman of all time, attributed his phenomenal success to sending out a monthly postcard to each and every one of his past clients. On all of the post cards sat the words “I like you,” and this simple gesture was enough to provide Girard with hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in income.
- Soliciting your customer’s opinions on your business, and visibly implementing their suggestions, provides a great opportunity for letting your customers how much their happiness means to you. The simple act of taking a customer’s suggestions seriously is enough to increase that customer’s feelings of personal connection to your business.
- Blogging, social media, and e-mail marketing make it easier than ever to create a feeling of community among your customers. By taking the time to touch base regularly and to lift the veil of your organization’s day-to-day operations and future plans, your customers will feel like your business is as much a part of their personal life as their friends and family. All of these channels also provide you with a direct line towards providing customer appreciation goodies and offers such as news about sales, coupons and special events.
As you can see, customer appreciation isn’t bought; it’s built through a regular demonstration of personal care. And when it comes to showing individualized interest and involvement you hold the clear advantage over your larger competitors.
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Jason Phillips is here to strengthen his writing skills. He is also a strategic consumer behavior specialist who thinks consumer behavior research tools are best tool to measure user engagement over a time. Visit here to know more about consumer’s behavior.