Whatever you think you’re selling, you are really selling customer satisfaction.
The customer has to believe that the price was right, the quality was acceptable, the delivery was on time, the order was accurately filled and the process was positive. You can think you are selling anything from apples to zebra, and you will not sell very many if you don’t provide the customer with an excellent user experience. Today, more than ever, customers have unlimited sources from which they can purchase anything they want. It is desperately difficult to get a customer to consider your company in the marketing cacophony that bombards us daily. Therefore, when you are lucky enough to sell something to a new customer, it is absolutely imperative to make that customer happy, so they will become a loyal customer. Perhaps there are businesses that build their business on new customers, but they are few and far between. The surest way to build and maintain a great business is to have satisfied customers. But, sometimes we spend so much time, money and effort on finding new customers that we tend to forget about our most valuable customers: the ones we already have.
Customers appreciate consistency. They demand accuracy. They insist their suppliers have complete knowledge about processes and products. The actual product has to stand on its own. It must be fairly priced, functional and effective. That’s a given. What can set you apart from your competition are the other things that go into creating an excellent user experience. Those are the things that can be automated and systematized to ensure a consistent, satisfactory and confidence-building customer interface that will ensure repeat sales. The key component in providing this level of excellence in customer service is to implement an excellent OMS and WMS. Without these, your business is reinventing processes every day. Training new employees is time consuming and inconsistent. Information is never adequate, timely or in the right hands. Conversely, with an excellent OMS and WMS, the business owner can really take control of the business and ensure the uniform delivery of excellent performance.
Let’s look at some things that are obvious when we think about them, but are all too often forgotten…
- A loyal customer’s future business is worth 10 times as much as they spend on their first purchase.
- You are only going to close sales to a few new customers. Business types vary, but a normal closing rate is between 5 and 20%. On the other hand, you are likely to close 70% of sales to a customer you’ve done business with before—but only if the customer’s past experience was positive.
- Customers are easy to offend and difficult to win back. Even if they continue to do business with you, they will have to experience at least 12 positive interactions to fully make up for one negative experience.
- People love to spread bad news. At least twice as many people will hear about a complaint against your company as will hear about a compliment.
- It’s expensive to get a new customer—as much as 7 times more expensive than it is to keep one.
- Not everybody complains. If you get one complaint from a customer, there are probably more than 25 customers who have the same complaint, but choose to remain silent and shop elsewhere.
- Customers crave a better experience. The biggest motivation for a customer switching brands is because they believe the customer experience will be superior.
The best investment a company can make is in the tools necessary to provide a consistently excellent user experience.
The two most important tools that will help you accomplish that are an effective Order Management Software System and an excellent Warehouse Management Software System.
We can help.
Avectous.
Take Control.