How NOT to Treat Customers

When it comes to attracting customers, you must first keep in mind that you need to please the ones you already have. This means knowing the difference between how to treat them and how not to treat them. After all, if you keep your current customers happy, they are much more likely to share their positive experiences with their friends and family, which is excellent for boosting your brand awareness and customer count. Here’s a quick look at six tips you can follow to enhance the customer experience.

1) Don’t Lie to Your Customers

Don’t tell your customers that your product or service is better than all of your competitors because it probably isn’t. It might be just as good, but if it was the best of the best, then you wouldn’t have to worry about promoting it because your customers would come straight to you. Instead of over exaggerating your product/service, simply state its pros, while at the same time mentioning its drawbacks. This will prove to your customers that you are trustworthy and worth doing business with.

2) Don’t Ignore Your Customers

If a customer calls in and makes an inquiry, don’t leave him hanging for an answer. Instead, put off what you’re doing and answer the inquiry as quickly as possible. Customers prefer convenience, and this means you need to accommodate their requests in a reasonable time period. Never go more than 24 hours without calling a customer back. Even if you don’t have an answer yet to their inquiry, at least call them and let them know you are still working on finding the answer.

3) Don’t Employ Rude Staff Members

You should always screen your employees before hiring them and make sure they will be considerate of the customers that contact your business. A single rude employee can lead to financial ruin for your company. Sure, everyone has a bad day every now and then, and if you notice that an employee is having one of these days, simply pull them off the floor and away from answering the phone so that a customer won’t be negatively affected.

4) Don’t Fail to Honor a Promotional Price

If you inform your customers that a certain product or service will be on sale for a specific period of time, don’t fail to honor that price. If you do, it will appear that you are trying to run a scam. And if there are any fees or surcharges added to the purchase price, make sure they are clearly outlined before the purchase is made.

5) Don’t Ignore Unhappy Customers

You can’t please everyone, so you must prepare for unhappy customers. Never should you ignore one of these customers — or any customer — and it’s imperative that you do everything within your means to remedy the situation as effectively and quickly as possible.

At the end of the day, customers determine the fate of your business. If you keep them happy they will come back to you time and time again. If you lose their confidence once then chances are you’ve lost them for ever.

Remember, on average it costs up to 10 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one.

6) Don’t Make Your Checkout Process Difficult

Whether it be in your physical store location or online, the checkout process for purchasing your products/services should be simple. This means that you don’t need to require your customers to sign up for anything in order to buy what you’re selling. You may as them if they’d like to provide you with their addresses, telephone numbers and emails, but it shouldn’t be a requirement to check out.

If it’s an online transaction try to stick to the new form of a one page checkout, rather than making them go through 3 or 4 pages of information before they are able to complete their final order.

If you want to learn more about how to reach your audience and keep them coming back to you please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] I’ll be more than happy to chat.