As a business, your customers are everything. They are the oxygen to your business, and without them, you have no business. This is why it is crucial that you take care of your customers, and interact with them in the right way. Unfortunately though, there are many mistakes that businesses make every day, that make their customers disgruntled and disappointed, and which results in the customers leaving them forever.
The good news is that you learn by your mistakes, and by making a mistake once, you can learn from it. And hopefully, you won’t make the same mistake again. The catch, however, is that if you’re not aware of the fact that you’re not putting your customers first, there’s a risk that you’ll continue to make them, not realising that they’re damaging your customer relationships.
So therefore, in this article, you’ll learn 8 common mistakes that businesses make in their customer interactions.
Mistakes happen to everyone – how do you deal with them?
1. Content that does not appeal
Consumers are exposed daily to a large amount of messages from companies. In order to reach your target audience, the key is therefore able to get through the big noise of messages. To succeed, communication can not be intercourse. Due to fierce competition, your content must create interest in attracting attention. Another factor to keep in mind is to facilitate your customer interaction as much as possible. In particular, the content must be readily available. The recipient is not required to review time-consuming processes to access the content. For example, you should avoid asking the customer to fill in long forms, as it may result in the customer losing interest. The risk is then that they lose your content, and you may have missed an important customer.
2. Difficulty in delivering quality
The importance of communicating across borders is then old. This also applies to companies where different departments must communicate with each other to create a coherent customer interaction. Thus, communication must be of the same high quality in all channels – whether it’s landing pages on the website, in physical stores or via SMS.
Figures show that more and more people surf through their mobile phone. Therefore, it is very important to place a lot of focus on the mobile experience. For example, all digital content produced mobile must be customized. This, to give the customer a positive experience and maintain consistent quality across all touch points.
3. Too little research
A third mistake company often undertakes in its customer interaction is that too little time and resources are being put on research around the customer’s wishes. To create interesting content for the customer, it is a and o to know what the customer wants to see more of. This research is often placed on the marketing department, but may be useful for all departments to share. For example, this may be valuable information for the sales department or product development. However, the information is unfortunately too often at the marketing department.
4. Low understanding of customer experience
Unfortunately, many companies do not fully understand their customers, which is often reflected in their communications. In order to improve its customer interaction, it is important to put in customer shoes. What does the customer think and think about, and what expectations do they have on you and your company? Often silence is a receipt that your communications have not been properly picked up. Therefore, in silence, you should review why communication does not create commitment to the customer. The problematic here is that many companies do not have elaborate processes to get in, understand or act on the customer’s silence.
5. Focus on new customers
In many cases, we can see how resources are being spent on finding new customers, instead of focusing on increasing the loyalty of existing customers. If you do not have a program for onboarding and loyalty or not working with account based marketing, interaction with existing customers may need to be reviewed. Equally important as it is to engage new customers is to take care of those who do not engage.
6. They do not market.
Once you have started your business, you have at the same time undertaken to be as interested in marketing and sales as showing managers how they get better, or making cars or what you do now in the company.
Many companies do not realize that there are at least 1000 different ways of marketing businesses. They do as they think they should do instead of trying different things. For some industries, advertising works well, for others not. Some industries require much more presence of the company’s owners – that the owner is considered an expert simply, while other companies are not dependent on highlighting key people who see more.
Never believe you can do without marketing. If you have invented a car going on grass – congratulations. You can stop reading here. For us, it is necessary (and very fun) to work with marketing. The problem with marketing for many new businesses is that they confuse the concept of expensive advertising campaigns or huge budgets. Advertising is just a percentage of all the things you can do to promote your business. Marketing is really all you do to get potential, and existing customers, to discover what you can do for them in a regular manner.
7. They do not measure the results of their marketing and do not know where they are heading.
Many companies routinely put down a lot of money on animals and ineffective marketing. I say animals and inefficiencies because they do not measure the results of their activities. The magic formula for marketing is super easy. It’s just about testing. Test different things and see what works for your particular industry and continue to do what works.
8. They start the company for incorrect reasons.
Some start companies to immediately earn a lot of money and are disappointed that it does not happen automatically. Another reason may be that they think they will have much more free time – the same thing there will not be that. Do not become a red wine contractor.
Conclusion
Everyone makes mistakes, but by learning from your mistakes, and actively learning from other people’s mistakes, you can avoid making them yourself. Hopefully, you have taken note of these 8 mistakes, and if you were making them without realising it, rethought your customer interactions.
About the author
Jens is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Veloce International marketing blog and the influencer marketing directory Veloce Network. He is also a contributor to Millenary Watches journal.