Entry Software Corporation

Entry

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Find Out What Customers Think About Your Business

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Businesses, successful or not, can always find ways to improve and better their success. The best way this can be done is by identifying how well you are doing by hearing what your customers have to say. Customers are a huge impact and part of a business, service or product base, since they are the people companies target, to buy and support your products. Although, how can a manager or owner find out how well their company is doing? Simply taking the time to send out an online survey, acknowledge and read review sites, or send out feedback forms.

Online Survey

With a large increase in technology over the years, it has evolved our world to be very technologically advanced. Why not take advantage of this, and turn to technology to reach out to customers. Creating an online survey, focused specifically, on how well you are doing, is a great way to keep in touch with your customers. This can give your company information that could be the answer to how you can improve for the future.

Not a lot of people are filling out your survey? This can be a common issue since some customers do not want to waste their time on a survey. A quick fix can be to reward your customers for their time, maybe with a special promotion or 10% off their next purchase or a gift card. By doing this your customer has incentive to fill out the survey, and your business gets reviews that can better their success, without breaking the bank too much.

Review Sites

Another way to reach out to your customers online can be through review sites. Review sites are a huge factor in shaping a business online reputation, regarding if it’s good or bad. It would be a waste for companies not to focus on these sites since it is a great way to collect valuable feedback. Customer review sites that are not initially set up by the business itself, also entices customers to be more honest with their reviews. Why? Asking for customers to review a company on a different, trusted review site is more authentic and is less “screened.” Negative feedback can be hard to digest, however, the businesses that acknowledge criticism and can strategize how to improve, will be the most successful.

Feedback Forms

Moving away from technology, another great form to get reviews from your customers are sending out anonymous feedback forms. Handing these forms out to your customers, if you’re a company that interacts with customers face to face, gets quick and valuable information. This can be done by assigning your employees to hand out these forms to customers as they enter the store, designating a spot to hand them in when they are done. As previously mentioned, rewarding your customers when they fill out the forms will entice them to complete the form, making it a win-win situation for both parties. Later, managers can spend time reviewing the information and determine any correlations with repeating issues that may arise. This can then be analyzed by a team, determining how to resolve these solutions.

Customers are a great way to see how well your company is doing since they are the people who are using your service and or product. Although having a solution such as a help desk, can manage customer satisfaction, in an easy and organized way, keeping your business on top of its game. Help desks are a great solution for businesses, to visually see how well they are doing and identify the areas that are maybe lacking. Evaluating and resolving the information gathered from online surveys, review sites, as well as feedback forms, is a great way to identify how well your business is doing, leading to better success down the road.

What Poor Customer Service Will do to Your Business

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We’ve all heard the saying “what goes around comes around”. This means the consequences of one’s actions will be dealt with accordingly. This saying is especially true when it comes to providing bad customer service. If you and your company offer less than satisfactory customer service, it is more than likely that there will be a result of a negative consequence. Think of it this way, if you provide poor customer service to one person, they will most likely share their subpar experience with friends and family. Their inadequate experience will either be spread through word of mouth or even worse, through social media. The following are the most common results of poor customer service.

1. Leaving For a Competitor

One of the worst feelings can be when a loyal customer discontinues using your product or service and uses competitors instead. Keeping customers waiting can be a prime example of why customers will leave. If customers are constantly being put on hold or if they are always hearing the phrase “we’ll call you back…”, they’ll get tired of waiting. Eventually, they’ll get sick of not being the companies first priority and leave you for a competitor. A way to avoid this is having exceptional customer service by never keeping your customers waiting around.

2. Negative Social Media Encounters

Everybody and their mother is active on social media nowadays. Information can be passed from one screen to the next in seconds. Having your company being exposed to social media can be one of the most detrimental things to happen to a company. This is because once people post something, it never leaves the internet and your product or service will always have a negative impression. If you keep customers happy, they’ll be posting positive comments recommending your business to a friend, rather than posting complaints about your less than satisfactory customer service. Complaints travel 10 times faster than compliments.

3. Lack Of Respect

If you don’t value customers, and act like they aren’t important, they’ll feel unappreciated. Disrespecting customers will often lead the customers to have a lack of respect for you. This relates back to the saying “what goes around comes around” because once you or your employees begin to show a negative attitude and disrespect towards customers, they will do the same to you. Not only will your customers disrespect you, they are more likely to stop using your product or service because of the negative experience they had.

In conclusion, in order to keep your business up and running, you need to have exceptional customer service tactics. The consequences of poor customer service can be detrimental to your sales. In the future, try and avoid less than satisfactory customer service in order to dodge the negative backlash from customers.

Four Key Ways to Reduce Customer Efforts

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In the world of business, the customer is king. Although the business determines the product or service, customers are those that go out of their way to purchase. In our modern age, customers have a wide variety of options to shop from and thus businesses have to appeal to each customer specifically. This is known as keeping customer satisfaction high. With a high customer satisfaction, customers will be more inclined to spread the word about the quality of your business and your offerings. One avenue of increasing customer satisfaction is to have an efficient and convenient system of purchasing so customers put little to no effort in checking out. In general, people will be more likely to go with the more convenient option than to go out of their way to do business with you. To achieve this, there is a few simple systems a business can put in place to reduce customer efforts and increase overall customer satisfaction.

Provide an Online Self-Serve Service

It’s no secret that the internet is one of the greatest inventions of our time. It connects people from across the world, allowing them to interact and communicate with one another anytime, anywhere. Almost every home across the world has access to technology that can access the internet. This has lead to numerous opportunities for businesses everywhere to expand outside their region. Customers can access your product or services from the comfort of their own home. Although it may be simple, it is very important; move to an online space. Setting up and maintaining a website is both cost-efficient and cost-effective, not to mention it will boost your clientele to a national if not global state. This reduces the customer’s effort, they no longer have to go out to scout your business to doing so anytime, anywhere.

Guide Customers Through Simple Interactions

When a customer wants to purchase a product, they want a simple and quick method of doing so. Leaving customers impatient or confused will lower satisfaction and raise effort needed in a given transaction, which is not good for business. Input a system of simple and quick interactions between the customer and the business to keep customers happy! This can be done by clearly categorizing and price labelling which can be more effectively done on a website or landing page. The business can use SEO (search engine optimization) and other simple UI (user interface) so the customer can visually see what they are purchasing and for how much. When a customer can search for and claim their desire quickly with little effort, they are very satisfied.

Supply Customers with Avenues for Feedback

Your product, service or method of purchasing is never perfect and will always need to be refined with the changing times. Sometimes customers may encounter an issue with an aspect of your business. Encountering any issue will lower that customers satisfaction with the business, however, it is how the business deals with the issue that can benefit the customer and the business. This is done by having an accessible avenue for a customer to offer their feedback on their experience. If they have an issue, it is likely that other customers may have had similar issues. The business may not know about problems in their system but by having an effective feedback system, it can benefit the business while also have the customer be heard. These avenues can be verbal via the phone for example, or online in the form of an email, chat message or text request.. A help desk is a software that allocates an aspect of the website to receiving and organizing customers questions or concerns about the business’ designated customer service team. Having an accessible way of doing so reduces the customer’s effort when addressing issues.

Proactively Using Feedback Gathered to Form Appropriate Solutions

Once you have received feedback that has hindered a customers experience, the business must look at ways of forming a solution to the issue does not happen again. This could be altering aspects of your UI or SEO or be related to assigning more appropriate names for products. Whereas supplying customers with avenues for feedback allows customers to speak up, actively using said feedback gathered to form appropriate solutions makes the customers feel heard. This makes customers feel appreciated. In turn, the alterations to the systems will lower the customer effort as they will not encounter the same issues.

In the modern business world, customers are an important part of the business formula. Their experience with the product or service can influence increased sales. Having customers put little to no effort in their purchase raises satisfaction with the business. This is why it is important to have proactive ways of keeping their experience simple.

Improving Customer Satisfaction with SEO

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most misused pieces of a businesses marketing initiatives. Many pieces of the puzzle must be put in place for it to be done successfully. Poor SEO could leave you lost for resources, potential customers and maybe even existing customers also. The goal of SEO is to allow your potentail customers to both find your website, and allow your current ones to find support or additional services easily. You might now be wondering, what is search engine optimization and how can you use it effectively? Improving Customer Satisfaction with SEO is key.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is the process of maximizing the number of views on a website in order to increase the visibility of a web page from the view of a search engine such as Google, Yahoo!, or Bing. For example, when you search for “new beds” on Google, it is more likely for popular online stores such as IKEA or Sears which specialize in general home furnishing. These websites are placed higher on the list because they are well known and well-established brands. The beauty of a search engine is that it will find the best example of what you have searched for no matter the complexity. When you search a more complex title such as “project management software comparison” on Google, the first results are related to the topic, even if it did not have the same name. Search engines will scan the whole page for text that is related to words used in your search.

Understanding the properties of search engines, people can tailor their websites to be associated with aspects of their respective industries. In doing so, this will attract more opportunities for web page searches. This in turn will generate new views and customers on web pages which allows the page to be viewed easier in relation to the top of the search engine. This will also have returning customers being more satisfied as it will be easier to locate your business web pages.

As stated earlier, SEO has many self contained aspects that need to be performed effectively for it to offer you the most results. You have to understand that SEO is a one-time process, algorithms change frequently so understanding systems and constant updates is needed in order to stay current. Perhaps all this may be too difficult for you; there are other businesses that will optimize your web pages for you. This will make the process much simpler as they are unkept by a third-party meaning you waste little to effort from your team.

In conclusion, in our technology focused business world, SEO is very important to maximizing online viewership. Search engines work to help potential customers finding what is best for them, so by containing key-word related to your business and industry you are generating new business. As you become more popularly searched, your clients will be able to put little to no effort finding your products, services or information that they need. Buildng proper SEO can help your customers self-serve and solve their own issues acting like an online knowledge base. How many times has someone said to you “just Google it”?

The Rules of Project Customer Engagement

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aka: The Customer is Not Your Friend

I realize that this may sound harsh… but it’s true! Follow the rules of project customer engagement and don’t necessarily treat your customers in the friendliest way possible. This statement and the premise of this article go far beyond that. The project customer is not your friend. By that I mean, the relationship as a whole is not ‘friendly’…it is ‘professional.’ There is a difference. Let’s consider….

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