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Customer feedback: Clever ways to collect it effectively

Customer feedback

Meeting or exceeding customer expectations is possible only if you know what exactly your customers want. Knowing their pain points helps improve the service quality and boost customer satisfaction.  A customer feedback survey is the best way of knowing about customers preferences, likes, dislikes and hidden requirements. However, businesses need to identify the customer feedback medium that would work best for them. Here are the best ways of doing the same:

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Still think you don’t need live chat for your website?

Live chat

So, you still think your business can thrive without a live chat service today? Well, if that’s what’s on your mind, you need think again! The most successful businesses today are the ones that value their customers and be there to assist them every hour of the day. And that’s possible due to a live chat service. Apart from providing 24×7 assistance, live chat contributes towards increased sales, loyal customers, brand recognition, lead generation and more. And it does not end here, read on to know why you really want this powerful technology for your business.

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Empower your customers and enhance the customer experience!

Customer experience

Whether the customer experience was fair, good or excellent is best known to the customer. Empowering them is a way of enabling them to express whatever they feel.

As a matter of fact, the customers today, want you to know what they want and whenever they want. Customer empowerment benefits the customers and the businesses alike. Here’s how you can empower your customers the right way:

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The best tips to handle support tickets faster than ever

Support tickets

A support ticket is commonly used in an organization’s customer support center to create, update, and resolve reported customer issues, or even issues reported by that organization’s other employees. Generally, staff receiving a query from a user would fill out a small card with the user’s details and a brief summary of the request and place it on a list of pending queries for an appropriate person. Support tickets help resolve queries that are impossible to handle in a single attempt. Since it eventually affects customer satisfaction, so, the entire process needs to be speedy. Here are some useful tips that can help speed up the entire process:

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Top 5 hacks for an effective brand building process

Brand building

Brand building refers to boosting a brand’s equity directly through advertising campaigns and indirectly through promotions such as event sponsorship. In order to build your brand effectively, you need to employ an exceptional brand building process. Now, what all does an effective brand building process do? Well, It does a lot! For instance, it:

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Top 5 tips to improve your customer service performance

Customer service performance

The quality of customer service you provide to your customers plays a vital role in the success of your business irrespective of its size. Therefore, almost all companies try to improve their customer service performance by employing the best strategies. Also, a productive support team will be consistent at all times. Here are the best strategies employed by the most successful businesses in order to maximize their performance in customer service:

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A complete guide to call center analytics: III

1. Cross-channel analytics

Customers today, have been provided with multiple channels through which they expect to be able to reach and interact with call center agents. The data flowing in from each of these channels contains valuable insights. This call center analytics enables organizations to identify and evaluate the data so gauged and choose the best channels for interaction with customers. Cross-channel analytics provides a way to determine what channels any of their customers are using at a given moment, and tailor their service options accordingly. Agents can provide a personalized and exceptional customer interaction if they have the required information at their fingertips.

Cross channel analytics
Cross-channel analytics

2. Self-service analytics:

This is yet another call center analytics that enables the users to access and analyze corporate data even if they are not trained as a data scientist and do not have any working experience with business intelligence and data mining. Self-service analytics helps to do so through the use of tools that simplify the ease of understanding. It further enables organizations to solve the problems and needs of a large number of businesses that too without the need for data professionals. Self-service requires minimal human involvement and helps cater a larger number of customers efficiently.

Self-service analytics
Self-service analytics

3. Performance analytics:

Performance analytics exempts the dependency of call center managers on daily reports and roll ups so as to know how well things are going. It basically offers online reporting and dashboard views of critical performance data, both real-time and historical, in context. This call center analytics enables the organizations to gauge and update relevant information and insights. Based on this information and insights, it further enables the organizations to take pro-active steps to ensure the best possible service to their customers. Thus, it actually helps enhance the customer experience to a large extent.

Performance analytics
Performance analytics

 

 

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Call blending and its unmatched benefits

Call blending refers to the capability to make outbound calls while also being able to receive inbound calls, all in one easy technologically created the system. It helps in the equal distribution of calls among the workstations in a call center. This means that all the agents have the same workload which further leads to increased customer satisfaction. These days, call blending is being used by a number of call centers to maximize the productivity of agents without overworking them. This process is entirely automatic as an agent finishes with an outbound call and becomes free, a tone will emit from his or her headset signaling that the line is connected to another caller.

Call blending
Call blending

There are a number of benefits of using call blending:

1. It increases customer satisfaction:

When you allow your agents to take both inbound and outbound calls at the same time, a number of incoming calls lowers down. This causes the workload to be equally distributed such that each agent receives the same number of callers. Since everyone stays busy and productive, the number of net calls accommodated in a day boosts up which further results in a higher satisfaction level from your customers.

Increased customer satisfaction
Increased customer satisfaction

2. It helps cut down on expenses:

Call blending enables your agents to take inbound and outbound calls which cut down your need to hire more employees. Thus, you can save on your payroll. With proper training, each agent can take on the responsibility of handling both inbound and outbound calls. Also, they can carry out the task without sacrificing the quality of customer service calls.

Cutting down the expenses
Cutting down the expenses

3. It helps accommodate customers’ needs efficiently:

With call blending each agent is provided with all the necessary information through utilizing a feature called screen pop. This enables all your representatives to respond more intelligently to their calls. Thus, with sufficient information on hand, an agent is able to accommodate a customer’s needs effectively.

An example of screen pop
An example of screen pop

 

 

 

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How to deal with a difficult customer: I

In today’s era, quality customer service is a necessity when you are trying to stand out of the crowd. It helps you differentiate your competitors. Businesses with poor customer service risk losing revenues, profits and even going out of business. You need to know that dealing with difficult customers is a part of any business and it is inevitable that you will need to deal with a difficult customer from time to time. As a matter of fact, you can’t control anyone else’s behavior. All you have control over are your own actions. However, you can influence how customers respond to you to some extent. Here are some steps to handle such situations:

1.Listening is the key:

Understand that the customer desires to be listened. So, just tune in to the customer rather than looking for the nearest exit. Strive to acknowledge and understand the customer  Let the person talk, and pay close attention to whatever he/ she says. You may even repeat or paraphrase some of what you hear.

Listening
Listening

2. Mirror your customers and connect accordingly:

In order to prepare yourself for handling difficult customers, you first need to mirror them. Some of your customers may have high technical knowledge and others may need high-level explanations. Some may need extra reassurance that things are going to be fine while others do not want to waste time unless you can offer a solution on the spot. Identifying and categorizing your customers accordingly can help you connect better with them. They will feel more like you truly understand what they want you to. Moreover, this will help them be more open to your assistance.

Mirroring your customers
Mirroring your customers

3. Never argue or show lack of interest:

Make it a point to never argue with customers when they are angry, displeased or complaining. When you allow a customer to push to an extent where you lose control of yourself, you lose control of the situation. Showing boredom, irritation, disdain or displeasure can make you lose a good customer.

Never argue with angry customers
Never argue with angry customers

4. Think before acting:

Dealing with difficult customers requires thinking before responding. Responding when angry can lead to nasty situations. Therefore, responses should exclude personal emotions and be given carefully.

Think before acting
Think before acting

 

 

 

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Tips to reduce average handle time: III

1. Encourage agents to provide top- notch service:

Average handle time boosts up in cases where many customers are waiting on hold. Reasons responsible may be that agents get exhausted handling call after call and hence, slow down. This leads to customers’ dissatisfaction and hence frustration. Therefore, it needs to be dealt appropriately. One of the most efficacious method of doing so is to encourage agents to take breaks between calls and get refreshed from time to time.

Exhausted call center agents
Exhausted call center agents

2. Leverage call control:

Call control is a skill and can be taught to the customer support agents through specialized training. The nature of calls being received at a call center is heterogeneous. In other words, the content of a call may vary from customer to customer such that, while  some might come straight to the point, others might go into irrelevant details before they come to the reason for their call. Therefore, it is extremely important for agents to remain focused and encourage customers to get back to the real point. Call control is a skill and can be taught and trained.

Call control
Call control

3. Make the most out of experienced customer reps:

As a matter of fact, nothing can beat the real, on-ground experience. Therefore, processes should be established leveraging the inputs of the most experienced customer service agents. Valuable experience can actually let the newbies know about the popular shortcuts and workarounds to achieve a target. On the other hand, managers should identify those agents who have a low AHT and discover what tactics they employ. Thereafter, these agents should be held as role models and be encouraged to share practical tips with others so as to improve their efficacy as well.

Nothing beats experience
Nothing beats experience

4. Access AHT data carefully:

As mentioned earlier, the nature of calls being received at a call center is heterogeneous. A variety of calls can be encountered there like some deal with billing while others may be related to accounts or general queries. As a matter of fact, AHT for all these are different, and thus an agent’s performance should take into consideration the nature of call handled by him or her. Therefore, the result for AHT should be analyzed accordingly. Similarly, if the marketing strategies or management decisions change, the impact should be calculated accordingly.

Assessing average handle time
Assessing average handle time

 

 

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Benefits of co- browse technology: III

1. Increased grade of customer engagement:

An increased grade of customer engagement is one more benefit offered by co- browse technology. Co-browsing teaches customers how to do things rapidly and effectively. Moreover, proactive invitations to shop together drive customer engagement, giving agents the ability to make offers, answer questions, and provide the help needed to close more sales as actively engaged customers convert. Co-browsing feature is of potential use to serve the customers that aren’t tech savvy.

Customer engagement
Customer engagement

2. Boosted e-commerce sales:

Co- browsing is not just meant for instant query resolution or instant guidance through the purchase process. In fact, agents engaged in a co-shopping session can be trained to up-sell, cross-sell, and encourage opt-in for future sales opportunities. These offers may include joining a mailing list, connecting on social media, subscribing newsletters and more.

Increased sales
Increased sales

3. Identify the weak points and help in customer service improvement:

Co-browsing can actually be used to monitor or keep a track of customer queries through screen shots of issues. These screen shots can be used for knowledge base, training, or bug fixes. It helps companies maintain real-time visibility into the customer experience and further assist in improving the customer service.

Co- browsing screenshots
Co- browsing screenshots

4. Enhanced buyer experience:

 

According to a study conducted by Forester, co-browsing has the highest customer satisfaction ratings of any customer support tool. The study shows that live-assist communication channels like phone, chat, co-browse have much higher satisfaction ratings than asynchronous electronic channels such as email, web self-service. Satisfaction ratings as stated by the above mentioned study are as follows: phone (74%), chat (69%), co-browse (78%), email (54%), and web self-service (47%). Thus, the study clearly proves that with co-browsing the customer achieves another level of customer service. Many a times it is seen that the customers ask the agent to co-browse because they understand that co-browsing will easily resolve the issue that too faster.

Enhanced buyer experience
Enhanced buyer experience

 

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Benefits of co- browse technology: II

1. Long term adoption of self service tools:

Showing customers how to utilize self service tools leads to the long term adoption of self service tools which is yet another benefit of co- browsing. It is extremely beneficial when:

i) a company is launching new online tools or updating existing tools or procedures

ii) when specific customer segments are having trouble using online tools

iii) when white-glove service can be provided to top-tier customers.

Utilization of self service tools
Utilization of self service tools

2. Differential customer service experience:

These days customers ask to co-browse when they contact an agent because they know co-browsing allows them to get help instantly and conveniently. In other words, co- browsing creates a differentiated customer service experience. This exempts the risk of losing customers and results in returning customers. Hence it improves your business performance.

 

Customer service experience
Customer service experience

3. Customer service agent satisfaction:

There is a possibility of agents being frustrated when customers articulate issues and agents are required to verbally direct the customer to perform actions online. Thus, providing the agents with technologies such as co- browsing reduces this frustration and leads to an increased efficiency of customer support. Moreover, agents appreciate being given the tools they need to be more efficient and productive so they are able to meet their performance goals.

Contented agents
Contented agents

5. Reduced call handling time and improved efficiency of customer support system:

Co-browse technology helps in the reduction of call handling time. As a matter of fact, the less call-handling time agents will take, the more level of customer service they will provide. Thus, co- browsing promotes efficiency by enabling agents to handle issues more quickly and accurately. It can also be used as a real-time live training tool to help on board new agents and familiarize them with the customer experience quickly and efficaciously. The customers also get satisfied as they get faster resolution and the agents save their time.

Customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction

 

 

 

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Your guide to omnichannel customer service

Omnichannel refers to a cross-channel business model that companies employ to increase customer experience and improve the quality of customer service. This approach has verticals in healthcare, government, financial services, retail and telecommunications industries, including channels such as physical locations, FAQ webpages, social media, live web chats, mobile applications and telephone communication. Companies that utilize omnichannel contend that a customer values the ability to be in constant contact with a company through multiple avenues at the same time.

Omnichannel
Omnichannel

Previously customers expected to receive service from an organization on the channel of their choice. Thus companies employed multi-channel customer service technique which made use of voice, email, SMS/text, web, mobile or social media. Omnichannel customer service takes the multi-channel customer service to the next level as with an omnichannel solution that integrates channels to provide a consistent customer experience.

Multichannel customer service
Multi-channel customer service

As far as the customers are concerned, channel is the least important matter of concern for them. What’s important for them is finding an answer to their question or a solution to their problem. For this purpose they may reach out via voice, mobile website or over a social media channel like Twitter. In today’s era, as more consumers adopt mobile devices, the lines between channels tend to blur. As a result, customer expectations for the convenience of starting a conversation in one channel and then continuing in another, become even higher.

Customer query resolution
Customer query resolution

Omnichannel self-service is a solution to such high end expectations of the customers. It empowers the customer to initiate an activity in one channel, and seamlessly transition to another such that a conversation that begins on Twitter can be continued via text message or phone call with all of the relevant context preserved across channels. Omni-channel solutions don’t require implementing every possible channel  and it also ensures the service level, responsiveness, and quality of service received on individual channels and across channels would be exceptionally high.

Contented customers
Contented customers

 

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Lead magnets for an efficient conversion: III

1. Demonstration:

In case of marketing, a product demonstration refers to a promotion where a product is demonstrated to potential customers. The sole purpose of such a demonstration is to introduce customers to the product to make them familiar with it in hopes of getting them to purchase that item. The products offered as samples during these demonstrations may be new products, new versions of existing products or products that have been recently introduced to a new commercial marketplace. Basically, the idea is to introduce your offerings, utilize them as lead magnets and demonstrate their capabilities.

Product demos
Product demos

2. Creative contact forms:

Creative contact forms are a better version of contact forms that you offer to customers. They are used to enhance the effectiveness of simple contact forms by using them to showcase your company’s personality. You need to be conversational and inviting to your audience.

Creative contact forms
Creative contact forms

3. Out of the box deals:

You may offer free two-day shipping or deals such as buy-one, get-one-free and much more in order to lessen the purchase anxiety that every customer experiences while purchasing. Since, it adds value to the transaction so it is an effective lead magnet.

Bonus
Bonus

4. Forms gating charges:

Consider gating price and other information if your goal is to target hot leads. Hiding your pricing behind a form can be an effective tactic as this particular form will help filter out unqualified leads, and capturing their information will help you follow up with targeted prospects.

Gating price
Gating price

5. Tests:

Tests or quizzes encourage prospects to measure themselves against your expertise or industry standards. This will give you an opportunity to give feedback and ideas. Also, the prospects will determine their need for your product or service.

Test
Test

6. Limited-time free trial:

Give prospects the opportunity to experience the benefits of your product or service, including a deadline to the offer at the same time. This will make them realize they can’t go another day without it.

Limited time free trail
Limited time free trail

7. Cheat sheets:

They are generally very short and cut straight to an ultra-specific point and can be delivered as checklists, mind maps, or blueprints. Mostly, they are just a page long in length.

Cheat sheet
Cheat sheet

8. Resource list:

A toolkit or a resource list is an easy to consume lead magnet. Depending on your niche, toolkits can be a good introduction for your target audience making them familiar with your products and in most favorable cases increasing sales and building long-term relationships.

Toolkit
Toolkit

 

 

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Tips to enhance the performance of your support agents: III

1. Arrange weekly meetings:

Arrange regular meetings for knowledge sharing. The basic idea is to discuss and understand the overall experience of your support agents with your clients. Try to understand what obstacles they face while they carry out a live chat with the website visitors, what kind of tricky questions customers may ask and how to resolve their queries. Agents can uncover important techniques of live chat support in this knowledge sharing process. This can aid in improving their overall performance.

Meetings
Meetings

2. Club videos with training sessions:

As a matter of fact, humans are visual learners. They tend to learn things more effectively if taught through graphics and videos. You don’t need to spend extra bucks on video tutorials. There are thousands of useful videos available on YouTube which can be utilized for this purpose. This is one of the best customer service training ideas that gives tremendous results.

Videos clubbed with training session
Videos clubbed with training session

3. Help them know their actual roles:

Yet another concept of your training should be to help your chat agents understand the actual role they need to play in building customer relationships. Educate them about the lifetime value of a customer as well as the consequences of a bad customer interaction. Let them know how the quality of customer support impacts on sales conversion, customer retention, and brand image. Once the support agents have this basic understanding, they will be more efficient in providing top-notch service.

Knowing respective roles
Knowing respective roles

4. Train them practically:

Practicing something practically helps you learn it better. Team up all of your agents and assign them different chat scenarios. Encourage them to try their best to deal with those given situations. Give them enough time to understand the whole support process, your products/services and most importantly, how to manage the live chat software. These practical sessions are very important to cultivate a capable workforce.

LIve chat tutorial
Live chat tutorial
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Tips to enhance the performance of your support agents: I

Today’s era is an era of digitization. These days the purchasing decision of any customer is not only based on the quality of your offerings but also on the quality of your customer service and support. Customer support refers to the process of building a healthy relationship with your customers by convincing them that you value them and you are there whenever they need you.Thus, the quality of your support service can improve or destroy your brand image and ultimately your business revenue. So, you need to train your live chat agents with the right customer service skill. Here, we have mentioned some of the customer service training ideas!

Good customer service
Good customer service

1. Good product knowledge:

Educate your support agents about the products and services you provide. Good product knowledge not only improves the support speed but also helps to build a much stronger, long- termed relationship with the customers. If your chat support agents lack the knowledge of products and services you are dealing in, they will tell customers to hold for a while for finding the solution or transfer the chats to a more knowledgeable person, which becomes time-consuming. Therefore having proper knowledge shows confidence and builds trust amongst customers.

Product knowledge
Product knowledge

2. Good writing skills:

Live chat provides instant assistance to anyone visiting your site. Customers utilize the live chat option as it is the fastest way to interact with companies in case they have any queries. A key component of a live chat interaction is the agent’s ability to exercise good writing skills. Utilize the auto spelling and grammar check feature of your live chat platform to ensure efficacious agent communications. Tell them to keep sentences short and to the point. Agents must be able to write as if they were talking on the phone in order to keep the conversation flowing by mixing free form and canned messages. Interject the customer’s name while chatting to personalize the conversation and take care of punctuations.

Chatting skills
Chatting skills

3. Refrain from taking things personally:

There are instances when the customers are not in a good mood and they interact in an unexpected manner. Teach your support agents not to take those things personally. Complaints are gifts from the customers. They contain customer insights and are a great way to know what exactly are their opinions about your offerings and support quality. Tell them not to lie to the customer. If they don’t have the answer just admit it. Ask your live chat agents to spend some more time with the website visitors and dig personal info like customer’s hobbies, liking and disliking and so on. In this way, the conversation will be friendlier and the person on the other side will feel comfortable and relaxed.

Friendly customer service
Friendly customer service
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How to increase customer lifetime value : Part III

1. Let your customers know how much you appreciate them:

Fans who show their loyalty every now and then by sharing your content on social media deserve to be rewarded, right? So, you can actually embed social media posts from fans who have shared your content or said something great about your brand to their followers. Put them in the spotlight and let them know how much you appreciate them and their efforts. They’ll make your brand a priority, once they see the reciprocity, The most common example is that of Soda Stream.

Soda Stream
Soda Stream

2. Send surprizes to your fans:

Who doesn’t like surprises? So, make it a point to send surprises to your fans so as to show your gratitude. Take a look at their social accounts to see what kinds of things they are fond of, and then send them something you know they’ll love. They’ll definitely share this experience with their friends, family, colleagues, and anyone else who will listen. Make sure that you do a little research and find something unique or, at the very least, different from what most people are talking about rather than sending something obvious.

Surprizes
Surprizes

3. Provide full experience to active customers:

This means keep your fans updated with your products and services. For example, if you have a product line, send them something they aren’t familiar with. If you have a premium service, give them the upgrade free of cost. This is truly the most effective way of increasing the customer lifetime value.

Service upgrade
Service upgrade

4. Acknowledge your customers’ suggestions:

Convince your customers that their suggestions are always welcomed. For this, always leave room for your customers to make suggestions that you didn’t list, and always offer some kind of incentive for participating in the poll. Even if it’s just a chance to win something small like a gift card or early access to an upcoming feature, it will make a huge difference in the number of people who actually participate.

Customer suggestions
Customer suggestions

5. Help your customers with their interests:

You can help customers do something they love. If possible, you may start “sponsoring” customers’ things that they are compassionate about.

 

 

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Best customer retention strategies : Part II

1. Reactivate the lost customers:

Customer retention can be easily achieved by dedicating resources to entice your lost customers. You can further regenerate business by approaching them in the correct way, with the correct offer. In other words, reactivating customers who are familiar with you and your product helps increase your sales.

As a matter of fact, re-contacting and overcoming their remorses and convincing them that you still value and respect them will surely result in exceptionally increased sales and boosted customer retention.

2. Utilize computerization:

Automation is yet another customer retention strategy that helps to minimize downtime. It further helps keep clients’ networks performing at their best. Moreover, leveraging automation tools and streamlining repeatable processes, companies can meet their commitments more efficiently. This further leads to customer loyalty.

Automation
Automation

3. Provide an impeccable customer service:

What is an impeccable customer service? – It means moving the product or service you deliver into the realm of the extraordinary. And how’s that done? – By delivering higher than anticipated levels of service to your customers. It includes:

i) dedication to customer contentment

ii) providing instant response

iii) no buck passing

iv) on-time delivery

v) error-free-delivery process

vi) recruiting outstanding people to deliver your customer service.

Exceptional service leads to fortunes in repeat customers, whereas poor service will drive your customers away.

Excellent customer service
Excellent customer service

4. Inculcate customer feedback survey:

As a matter of fact, customer feedback surveys are invaluable for learning whether you are meeting your clients’ expectations or not. So, Instead of comparing feedback across a broad range of customers:

i) narrow the data down to a specific client

ii) see what that client thought

iii) and take action from there.

You need to trend feedback across a period of time. You should track feedback survey in order to compare which areas have benefited and which have not. It will provide you with data regarding:

i) what customers are at risk

ii) which areas of your business need improvement

iii) and where you excel.

5. Avoid ethical shortcuts:

The design, build quality, reliability, and serviceability of your product or service should meet customers’ expectations. The way you handle the small things, as well as the large, demonstrates service integrity. Moreover, customers will be attracted to you if you are transparent with them, care for them, take a genuine interest in them.

Product integrity
Product integrity
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Best customer retention strategies : Part I

Customer retention is termed as a process of inculcating those techniques by the companies that help in the exemption of customer defections. The sole purpose of customer retention programs is to help companies retain as many customers as possible through customer loyalty and brand loyalty initiatives.

As a matter of fact, customer retention begins with the first contact a customer has with a company and continues throughout the entire lifetime of the relationship.

According to a research an average business loses around 20 percent of its customers annually due to customer dissatisfaction. In some industries, this leakage is astoundingly 80 percent. However, following some preventive measures can help curb this loss.

Here we have mentioned some of the best customer retention techniques that will enhance your customer retention significantly once implemented and will have a gigantic impact on your business.

1. Build relationships online and develop trust:

In today’s era majority of people are glued to their computer screens for hours due to those enticing social media platforms. so, connecting with your clients through these mediums can benefit you to a large extent. Majority of your clients will have active profiles on websites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc. So, it makes sense to connect with your potential customers through such sites. Moreover, trust is crucial in business, and building relationships with clients will cumulate that trust for you.

A study by the African Journal of Business Management found that commitment tends to grow along with trust. So you should take an interest in your clients and their business. Simply providing a service is not long enough. You further need to start building shared values with clients and showing you take an interest in them and their success.

2. Let your interest in the leads be consistent:

Though every business loses some customers virtually, not all of them measure or recognize how many of their customers become inactive. Ironically, many businesses spend lavishly on building that initial customer relationship. Then they leave that relationship unattended, in some cases even losing interest as soon as the sale is made. The easiest way to grow your business is to avoid losing your customers. Once you stop the emanation, it’s often possible to increase your growth rate quite efficaciously.

3. Identify customer expectations:

Set expectations early and lower than you can provide, so that you can eradicate uncertainty as to the level of service you need to offer to ensure your clients’ satisfaction. This technique enables your company to ensure you are always over delivering.

Since clients tend to remember negative experiences, so, your client will no doubt cite a negative experience as a reason to cancel his or her contract with you.

4. Use a rolling calendar of communication:

Building relationships with your customers are not enough! You need to be in touch using a rolling calendar of communications. This is a programmed series of emails, events, phone calls, “thank you’s”, special offers, follow-ups, magic moments, and cards or notes with a personal touch etc. that ensure constantly and automatically at pre-decided points in the pre-sales, sales, and post-sales process.

People not only respond to this in a positive manner, they really appreciate it because they feel valued. It acknowledges them, keeps them updated, offsets customer remorse, augments the reason they’re doing business with you and makes them feel part of your business and that too an important one!

5. Implement a monthly email marketing campaign and start a blog:

Email your existing customers once every month. Touch base with them, keep them updated with your services and share a couple of great articles you believe will help them profit from their business. You should also link to your articles as a way to drive your customers to your blog.

Write a weekly article on something interesting, say, an accomplishment you feel your customers would value. However, you need to be consistent with your blog. You need to start using it as a medium to build relationships with your customers.