If you run your business and marketing campaigns on a low budget, you probably have to prioritize your functions and operations to make informed decisions about your budget allocation. Your product development department might need some financial assistance from time to time, and your marketing team could use some padding. But if you spend too much on your customer service, you might feel like you are wasting money. After all, how can your customer service really improve?
Contrary to popular belief, the customer service team is just as important as the other departments or teams in a business. After all, your salespeople, front-end employees, and customer support staff are the direct connection between your business and your customers. They are the ones who give the first impression to your customers about your brand and service.
This post is about developing a customer service strategy to help you create a better brand image for your business. If you know how to build a customer service strategy, you will retain more customers and drive more sales to your business. All entrepreneurs need to be aware of the importance of an effective customer service strategy to survive in this highly competitive world.
The Importance of Developing a Customer Service Strategy
Providing good customer service is vital for your business. It helps you retain your existing customers, increase your average customer lifetime value, and extract more value from every individual buying from you. If you have an effective customer service strategy in place, it will increase your brand loyalty and make your brand stand out from the competition. Businesses that take their customer service strategy seriously can recoup their customer acquisition costs and save budget in their marketing efforts.
Investing money and time to develop your customer service strategy and team allows you to activate a snowball effect for your sales. If your existing customers are happy with your service, they are more likely to recommend your brand to their friends and peers. This gives you the benefit of free-of-cost marketing, or in other words, word-of-mouth marketing. People tend to trust what their friends tell them more than they believe what you convey to them in your ads. That’s why developing a customer service strategy is vital for maintaining healthy sales levels.
Reasons Why You Need a Customer Service Strategy 101
Have a look at the following list of data-backed reasons you should develop an effective customer service strategy.
1. Customer Retention is More Cost-Effective Than New Customer Acquisition
There is no secret in the fact that it is cheaper to retain your existing customers and influence them to make repeat purchases than to attract new customers and convince them to buy from you. To get new customers, you need to build a complete marketing funnel that costs a lot of budgets. People might even back off from a purchase at the last minute or at the last point of your sales funnel. This reduces the cost-effectiveness of your entire campaign, as the money you spent to bring them until the end of your funnel cannot be recovered.
Your existing customers, on the other hand, your existing customers just need to be reminded about your brand from time to time. Simply by sending a monthly newsletter or marketing emails, you can inform them about your latest sales offers and entice them with various incentives to visit your store.
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The amount spent on targeted ads is a lot less than the amount you need to pay to reach out to a new audience. Remarketing strategies often focus on razor-sharp targeting, likely to bring more results. Hence, you need a customer service strategy to get better results from your marketing campaigns.
In short, a rise in customer retention of only 5% is equivalent to growth in profit of 25%. This is because your current customers are likely to make more significant purchases, as they are already comfortable shopping at your store and buying from your brand. This means you have to spend a lot less on your operating costs when you are serving the same groups of customers again and again.
2. Your Customer Service Strategy Represents Your Mission and Values
You and your staff might know what your business represents. But your customers will only make assumptions about it based on your advertisements, website content, social media presence, and other marketing channels. Having an effective customer service strategy means you have better control over the perception of your customer service team. Since they are the ones who speak directly to your customers, their perception and perspective about your company’s vision and mission should be clear. They carry the responsibility of representing your business during their interactions with your potential customers.
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About 96% of customers claim that good customer service is important for building loyalty for any particular brand.
3. A Happy Customer Service Strategy Will Give You Happy Customers
When your salespeople and customer service employees are happy with their jobs, they will transfer the same pleasant mood and energy to your customers. A friendly ambiance gets customers in the mood of shopping and buying things.
Companies that have an effective customer service strategy give importance to the happiness of their customer support staff. According to a study, 69% of employees said they can work harder and perform better when their work is appreciated. Nobody will enjoy going to work and performing well if they feel under-appreciated. If you want your customers to be happy, you need to keep your employees happy. To do that, you need to have customer service strategies in place that align their objectives with your organization’s goals.
If you want your sales department employees to give their best to their jobs, you need to make them feel appreciated, respected, and happy. They will only get the intrinsic motivation to deliver to the best of their ability and get you results in terms of leads and sales.
4. Happy Customers Write Good Testimonials
Customer testimonials are precious for any business. They work better in bringing in new customers than any other marketing strategy you implement. This is because people like to try out the products or brands they see others are satisfied with. A good customer service strategy is focused on guiding your support staff to deal with customers so that they feel happy and satisfied.
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72% of customers like to share a positive shopping experience with five or more of their friends. They might choose to share via social media or in person. The way they share is as though they are referring your brand to others. They may not be doing this intentionally, but it will definitely work out in your favor. A happy customer who just bought a handbag from your store, for instance, might be raving about it to their friends over a meal later in the day. The friends might feel enticed to visit your store to check out the variety of handbags you have. Some of them might even end up buying a handbag from your store right away.
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5. A Good Customer Service Strategy Keeps Your Customers Loyal
As mentioned before, it is a lot more cost-effective for any business to retain old customers than to get new customers. The longer a customer stays loyal to your brand, the more you will save on your marketing efforts and the more revenue you will make. This way, you can make more profits from every customer that you get and can retain.
A customer service strategy plays a significant role in ensuring your existing customers stick with your brand. You might want to review your strategy from time to time to keep it up to date with the changing customer trends and preferences.
6. A Customer Service Strategy Can Help You Get Valuable Insights
How your customers perceive your brand greatly impacts your brand image and sales. It does not matter much how you see your brand. What’s important is how your customers see it. For example, if you run a company that sells athletic wear, you might associate your business with health and fitness. But your customers might see your brand differently. Those who buy from you might be doing so because they associate your brand with comfort, attractiveness, and leisure. You need to align your marketing efforts with these values to create more relatable campaigns for your audience when you find this out.
If you have an excellent customer service strategy in place, your sales staff can answer many such probing questions when they speak to your potential customers. Instead of spending money and time on surveying your target audience, you can simply get your sales team to directly ask these questions from your prospects. The responses you get in this way can give you valuable insights into your target audience’s mindset, preferences, and choices. You can use these insights as building blocks for improving your products.
At Strikingly, we intend to maintain a customer service strategy that keeps our users satisfied with the features of our platform. Strikingly is a growing website builder which offers various tools to enable you to create a quick, free-of-cost, and professional website within a few hours. We have live chat customer support on our website. If our users have any queries regarding our tools or services, they can contact us instantly through live chat or browse through our Knowledge Base to find answers to their queries.
