No longer can business owners just rely on your website to promote your business – there are many many places around the net that have your business brand details available to the public and it’s vital for you to manage this with effective brand monitoring.
I was recently in discussion with a prospective client who was telling me how they want to compete with a much larger competitor on price. My response to them was – don’t even try. Larger organisations have larger buying power, more low wage staff, larger inventories and basically larger scales so will always come out better on price.
My advice was to compete with them by delivering a better customer service and better experience for customers. This doesn’t require scale or buying power – it just requires you to be good at your job and to be responsive to your customer’s needs. Things that a smaller company can be excellent at but larger companies usually struggle with.
As it happened, I was sent the infographic below from Websitebuilder.org (one of our regular blog contributors) that clearly demonstrates the link between customer service and customers buying habits but also discusses how your customers have moved to using Social Media to make those enquiries and complaints. Looking at the figures it’s easy to see how your business could be directly impacted (good and bad) by the customer service that you deliver (or not).
The good news is that with tools like Reputation Management and Brand Monitoring Software, there is a way to take control of this and deliver that excellent experience for your customers. As it says at the top of the infographic – your customers will spend between 3% and 20% more when they get an answer to their enquiry.
What you need to also consider is that by not taking control over your online reputation and monitoring what people are saying about your brand you may not even be aware that you’re delivering a poor experience!
Some other points of interest include:
- 50% of people will abandon a brand because of poor customer service
- 90% of social media users have used it to contact a brand
- 63% of users expect a brand to offer customer service via social media
- 1 in 4 social media users used it to complain in 2015
- 31% of customers use social media to make a pre-sales enquiry
- 71% of customers with a positive social customer care experience are likely to recommend the brand to others
- 95% of customer complaints on social media don’t reach the company (because they’re not looking out for them)
- 42% of customers that complain on social media expect a response in an hour
- For every 1% of customers that return for a subsequent purchase turnover increases by 10%
Take a look at the figures for yourself…
