Making a sale is only the start of the business-customer relationship. Well, at least it should be. The end target of any sales organization worth its weight is to bring in repeat business.
This implies fostering a presumed long term relationship from the start of any relationship. The reactions that real purchasers have to what your business offers reflect more strongly than any advertising campaigns. This truth runs all ways. In a web world, this is a perilous thing. Only one bad review can adversely affect a business in ways which are essentially immense.
So how do you stop 1 or 2 negative comments ( real or invented ) from tarnishing the opinion of potential clients?
The simplest way is thru a pro-active approach to your internet business identity. This can lower the cost of bad press and hopefully reduce it to zero.
Make a customer facing organization.
Don’t presume that each person you hire knows the best way to handle tough clients with tact and grace. It costs almost nothing to effect temporary client service coaching for all new workers that stresses the vivacity of this dying art. Even a purchaser that’s mad about a flawed product can be calmed with a relaxing voice or online character. Head off bad reviews by forecasting the requirements of staff at the outset.
Be simple to contact.
Show clients that you are concerned about interaction by providing online and telephone options. Some individuals would prefer to fill in a form online than pick up a telephone. Others wish to have a human connection straight away. Provide both options. Following a sale, generate an e-mail with contact info and an exchange number. Make it very straightforward for discontented purchasers to obtain you and not get even more annoyed during the process.
Pretend you’re a future customer.
Make a regular practice of making online searches on your company. You’ll probably find your official site, but what else comes up? Check the initial few pages of results. Research tells us that the bulk of online users don’t go past the 1st page of a search, and even less look past the second or 3rd pages. Do a similar thing a possible customer will do. If you find a horrid review, continue to the following step.
Create a positive online face.
Create more than you main domains and flush out the bad links with your own positive ones. This isn’t a straightforward task to do, but a technique that does work. Create blog accounts outside of your official page, maximise social media profiles and come up with secondary site concepts. With the right steering, your positive info will finally trump the negative.
Ask, ask and ask again.
This is a simple, actually cheap way to keep on top of customer wishes. Don’t wait for a cut in business, or for a horrid review to pop up. Find out in what ways that you can better accommodate your present customer base and then get to work making it occur. Purchasers that are frightened away from your company after self-research are ones that you are going to never have an opportunity to win over. What’s more, you’ll never know they were interested. Avoid losing sales by implementing intuitive practices. One or two simple measures will make sure customer loyalty continues while defending your online reputation.
Bottom line, social media is a friend and a foe. Be certain to keep your enemies close and under control to the extent you can.