A small business can be a better business by fostering excellent customer care. Indeed, it could be a key quality that differentiates a business from its bigger rivals. So much so that many large and growing firms go to great lengths to maintain the personal touch. It’s part of what keeps customers coming back for more.
In its simplest form, customer care is way of thinking. Many small businesses are hungry for new customers and passionate about keeping them. As a result, they may naturally invest more time into building one-to-one relationships with customers, or choose to ‘go the extra mile’. This could mean offering discounted prices to loyal customers, doing a bit extra without charging for it, or possibly just talking closely with customers about how they could be better served. There are many approaches, but often, it’s a business’s attitude, passion and commitment to the customer experience that counts.
Of course, customer care is often more complicated than that. Especially for large or growing businesses, where a more systematic approach may be required. For example, a business with thousands of customers may employ database technologies to segment customers into groups, in order to understand and serve them more effectively, or to identify lapsed customers so that efforts can be made to attract them back. Similarly, businesses with lots of employees - whose people perhaps don’t care so intrinsically for customer care - may struggle to maintain the personal touch, and as a result might have to encourage employees to care through training or incentives. Such issues might be especially important for growing businesses, where the transition away from close customer relationships may affect customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Big corporations often spend millions investing in customer care, and still fail to get it right. Conversely, a small business may spend nothing and deliver a truly unrivalled customer experience. This indicates that both tangible and intangible influences are vital to great customer care. In short, customer care is both a science and an art.
For businesses of any size, customer care offers a very real opportunity for competitive advantage. And crucially, it cannot be easily bought. It’s a unique opportunity to be different and better than the rest, and it should be treated as such.
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