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When a business is going through a rocky patch, it is often the customers that take the brunt of the misery. As a result, customer satisfaction rates can start to fall, and you might even end up losing some of your loyalist customers. That is not what you need when you need as much custom as possible to improve your business’s sales and pull yourself out of the bad period!
Thankfully, there are lots of things a struggling business can do to keep its customer happy. Here’s my five-step guide filled with useful tips on turning it around.
Stay Positive
If your customer-facing staff are happy and friendly, then this positive attitude will rub off onto your customers. Whereas employees who are obviously stress or frustrated in their jobs will give any customers or clients who they talk to a very bad impression of the company. So, even if your business isn’t doing too well at the minute, make sure all your employees know that they shouldn’t let this show in public.
Think About Outsourcing
Are you very tied up with trying to improve your business’s sales and marketing? If so, you might not have much time to see to customer relations. You might want to use the services of a website that offers help with reputation management. This could also be a good call if your customer service team are completely swamped with bad reviews and customer complaints. Outsourcing your reputation management is a quick-fix solution for the short term.
Improve Staff Training
Each and every one of your staff members need to be able to deal with any customer complaints or bad reviews in a friendly and professional manner. This can help smooth things over with customers and improve their impressions of the company as a whole. If you think that your team isn’t doing so well in this area at the minute, it’s worth investing in some customer service training. If you already have training programs in place, it’s worth reviewing them to see how they can be improved.
Correctly Set Customer Expectations
One mistake that most companies make at one point or another is that they raise their customer’s expectations way too high. If you are offering your customers endless promises, there is no way you will be able to deliver. And that will only leave your customers thoroughly disappointed. If you reduce the amount of promises you deliver and lower your customer expectations, you will find that their satisfaction slowly improves.
Get Employee Feedback
Your employees are working right on the coal face, and they might be able to give you some hints or tips as to how things could improve. It’s also worth getting them to ask customers for their feedback. If they relay this information back to you, you could use it to your advantage. So, never be too shy to ask a customer’s opinion!
Struggling business shouldn’t struggle with unhappy customers for too long. Hopefully, these tips can help you turn things around for the better in your company!
