Ideas to make it easy on your customers

I’m sure you’ve heard me mention you should make things easier for your customers. Today’s highly competitive market place, with great product and service parity, means the customer experience is the critical element for customer engagement and retention.

Have you been thinking about how to make your customer’s lives easier? Yes. Great.

No? Okay, I’ll let you off the hook this one time. :) Here are some ideas that might jumpstart your efforts. Consider:

• Deliver customer communications, like invoices, updates, newsletters, etc., via email or paper (allowing customers to choose).

• Can customers easily buy more services or products from you? Maybe they want to upgrade or add another service to their existing package? Can they do that from your Web site?

• Do you offer web self-service (to any degree)? This way customers can update online their billing information, mailing information, products and services they buy from you (see idea above).

• Can customer’s sign up for an automatic re-order? This could be every two months, just ship more of your product. Or, at least offer an email alert every two months with a reminder to buy more and a link to do so--and maybe a repeat customer discount.

• Make it easy for customers to find your Web site via a search engine. Your customers may not recall your Web site URL and need to Google you. Can they find you in the top 3 results when they Google your name or specific service/product?

• Is it easy to ask your company a question or get more information? Where is your phone number published? On your Web site (top of page or Contact page)? On your invoices? On your marketing materials.

• Upgrade your email customer service--that improves the experience. Respond to all emails within 24 hours, or 48 hours at the latest. Customers want a response in 24 hours or less, and so many companies still fail to even reply to customer emails at all (like Netflix, don’t get me started).

Any of these suggestions give you an idea? It doesn’t always have to be hard to improve the customer experience and get more business. There are tools online that can help you with many of the above experience upgrades and they aren’t necessarily difficult or costly.

Let’s remember how important the customer experience is. An increase in customer repeat business and retention can help your bottom line in a powerful way. This week I came across this statistic, “A two-percent increase in customer retention has the same effect on profits as cutting costs by 10 percent.” (Source: Business Gain from How You Retain, CMO Council with CSC, IBM and Dun & Bradstreet, April 2008)

So jump in.