How To Keep Your Customers Happy

By Posted on 4 min read 1115 views

There are two schools of thought about post-sale customer service. They’re pretty much boiled down to:

  1. Keep your customers happy
  2. Don’t bother

I’m sure that in the past you’ve bought a product that you’ve then tried to get customer support on to find that they take days to answer each question or sometimes never even bother to answer at all.

When they do answer it’s often not very polite or even helpful. In fact, quite a lot of the time, they don’t even answer the question you asked or missed out part of the answer.

Personally I don’t like that.

I don’t like receiving support like that and I don’t like providing support like that. For me, my business is about helping other people achieve their goals.

In fact, it’s not just about it. It’s totally reliant on it!

If I don’t succeed in helping others achieve then they’re not going to let others know about my brands and services.

We always try answer any support questions within 24 hours. Actually, we have a policy of trying to answer peoples questions about marketing even if they haven’t bought a product from us.

One of the biggest causes of cancellations from services is a failure to implement what is being taught.

Getting your customers to implement what you’re teaching them is a lot harder than the actual teaching.

Each one of your customers has a life structure that has been built around not having to implement whatever you are teaching.

When they join your service they have the right frame of mind in wanting to learn more and improve. But they then have to find a way to make this new thing fit into a life structure that has been built without it.

And that’s the challenge.

In order to help my customers implement the product or service they have joined we run a post-sales implementation campaign.

We’ve given it a big name but in fact it’s a pretty simple email campaign designed to build engagement in the product. And…

…it’s been working awesomely!

Here’s what we do:

When a customer joins a service or purchases a product they get a welcome email saying that we’re creating their account and login details will be sent in 15 minutes.

We’ve found that creating a slight delay in this stage is very useful. Everything is instant these days and this moment of slowing the customer down slightly has shown to have the effect of preventing them skimming through everything the second they come in and making an instant decision on whether they like the product or not before they’ve even tried it.

When the login details get sent we include quick-start steps to show them how to do the one thing that they’re going to most want to do/achieve when they first login.

This part of the process guides your customers to a very specific process that is going to get them to see quick results.

Again the purpose of this is to slow down the customer from. By now they’ve had to wait a short period of time to get their login details and with those details they’ve been given the exact steps they need to take next.

Taking these steps is likely to be between fifteen minutes and an hours worth of work. But at the end of that, or even during that, they can see an improvement taking place pretty immediately.

Doing this you have done two things:

  • Given them a sense of achievement
  • Shown that if they follow what you teach then it will work for them

The next stage is to continue this process for the next two or three days by sending an email with action steps for the day.

What you’re doing is re-training their life structure to include taking your lessons and implementing them. We’re still testing but two or three days seems to be long enough.

After which… you can give them instructions on how to continue.

If you also run a community such as a forum, then you may also find it very useful to ask your users to introduce themselves in the forum as well. Make sure that someone from your team always welcomes people when they’ve introduced themselves as well as other members welcoming them in.

This step creates a sense of community and support for your new customer which increases the likelihood they’ll implement your lessons, after all if others are being successful then they can to, and feel like they’re in an environment where questions can be asked.

Finally…

Four or five days after your final post-sales implementation campaign email, send a last email asking them how they’re getting on and if they’ve got any questions.

This follow-up will generate an incredible amount of goodwill towards you as you’re openly asking your customers to ask you any questions and give you feedback.

Very few online businesses do this. Large corporations do it, but usually in the form of a survey which is impersonal.

So we take the large corporation approach and make it personal.

Forget websites, traffic, conversion, copywriting and everything else that you’ve been learning. The single most important part of your business are your customers. Treat them well and with respect and the rest will come naturally.

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