And the culprit is Email. 

Although email may be extremely convenient, inexpensive and effective, it is actually doing more harm than good. 

Read on to discover the top three ways that email is killing your business.

1. It’s unreliable: You never can tell if your email was sent through. Emails are constantly getting lost in cyber space. There are problems with connection, with servers and with your customer’s servers. 

Sometimes a customer will send an email and you will not get it for days. Furthermore, sometimes your reply will get lost. 

Either way, the customer will blame you and this miscommunication error will result in an unhappy customer and a lack of sales. 

2. It’s not personal: Emails are so standard these days that we forget how personal a real live conversation can be. When you receive an email, it is hard to determine the tone, emotion and feeling in the email. 

Customers are left wondering if your response is a generic email, an auto-response or an actual, personal attempt to solve the solution. This can be extremely frustrating for the customer.

3. It’s not in “real time”: Emails are quick; there is no denying this. However, they are still not in ‘real time’ meaning the response time can vary depending on when the reader receives the email and replies to it. This can be anywhere between 10 minutes and 10 years. 

Of course, when replying to customer inquiries with emails, you always reply within a standard period, say 24 hours; however, this is still not a real time solution. 

Often a customer needs help now, not whenever the email is answered. 

So what’s the solution to this?  Simple. Help Desks. 

Help Desks fix all of these email-related problems. They are reliable as someone is always there to answer a customer’s call. There is no more confusion or worry about whether your email went through. 

Furthermore, they are personal as each customer complaint is handled in an individual fashion. Speaking one on one to a customer service rep will allow the customer to feel connected and prove to the customer that your company cares about them. Speaking to a real person can work wonders in the customer service sector. 

Finally help desks are in real time. That is, when a customer calls, they will be connected to someone immediately. There are no long response times while the customer waits for a sales rep to log on and check their email. 

A customer inquiry should be answered the moment they place it. That way you are proving to them that you care about their problem right then, and that you are dedicated to helping find a solution now, not later. 

Help Desks are the perfect way to ensure your customers complaints and inquiries are taken care of in a professional and personal manner.

But the truth as we found out was that if a company can develop a sincere and loyal client base, not only will the sales increase manifold by virtue of direct sales to these clients but in fact they will also preach about your company and make it famous enough to draw sales.

Loyalty marketing has for such reasons become such a concern nowadays. In the present stature of competition it becomes important to sustain a group of extremely dedicated clients who have a strong bond with the company and help spread it and recover sales figures. They also last the longest.
 
Your loyalty marketing strategy should be well planned out and devised with due attention paid to every aspect possible. For this you need to know a few things. To begin with you have to know with what frequency your customers and which ones are returning to your enterprise to make purchases.

Offer special services to your valued customers and you’ll see them responding positively in turn. Thus you craft an efficient two-way system that facilitates al your transactions in future.

At no point should it look to them that this is becoming a sole money-garnering tactic on your part. There should be considerable attention you pay to their requirements too.

Your strategy should be important in how you approach your customers to ask them to refer you to new customers. There are 4 basic measures by which strategy is devised. These are:

• Customer behavior tracking: To facilitate loyalty marketing, there needs to be a definite attempt to locate your consumers and especially the loyal ones. You have to find out the expenses he/she incurs on your products. Their behavioral dimensions and attitudes towards the company should b noted simultaneously. This way you know in advance who is impressed enough and who is not.

• Measurement: Keep a track of the performance objectives that your company is trying to accomplish. Also find out the customers’ retention analysis data. These will enable you to track what is working against your concern.

• Dialogue Marketing: Make sure you are sending the right signals and the right ideas to your preferred customers. Also crucial is that you are sending them at the right time.

• Customer Rewards and Benefits Programs: Match the needs and the requirements of your loyal customers and offer them bonus and other gift items that will always please the customer concerned and act as incentives for them to push your firm.

• Loyalty brochure: There should be separate loyalty brochures that you could deal out amongst your customers to tell them what’s in store for them.

• Customer Rewards and Benefits Programs: For loyalty marketing, this is a very helpful platform for your loyal customers to actually earn or reap rewards from your company that is actually particularly matched to every individual customer’s needs and preference.

If you already know that, I can bet you do take extra care of each and every customer of yours. There is a simple formula that could do the trick for you and let’s see how it works.

While making our sales we need to show it to our customers that we have something always ready to improve the situation.

You will be surprised once you find out the worth of each customer. To find out the value of the customer one needs to know two pieces of information. We first need to know the average a customer does a year and next we need to know how long the average customer does business with us.

Once you have managed to get this vital piece of information you need to multiply both the values. The product of the two values would determine the lifetime value of the customer. Customers are like gold, precious!

By retaining all our customers we can add value in two ways. There is a definite way to increase business. To do so, one needs increase the frequency and value of the orders. Another way in which you could duplicate good customer is by referral and introducing new business.

It is very important to build strong customer relations. A business research shows it is much more difficult to keep an old customer than to find a new one. It’s sad and humiliating if we lose our customers to poor salesmanship.

The success of our business depends on how often we keep in touch with our customers. The main purpose of the article is to remind us of the importance of keeping in touch with our customer, as this would bring them back.

One should keep in mind that our competitors are always striving to take away our best customers, so the trick lies in keeping them like vintage playing cards. We should set in top priority to thank our customers for their business. It is our duty and we could easily find out how much they mean to us by simply multiplying. This calculation would help you to find out how much your top customers are worth. 

Customers are kind of funny. They will rarely tell you how you messed up, they will simply leave. Poof…gone! 
No matter what the size of your firm there are ways to get to the bottom of this problem. 

Call them. Talk to them. Mail them. Do your maintenance. 

Don’t just take the order and run. Remember, it is a lot easier and a whole lot more profitable to do more business with your existing clients than it is to find new ones. So, do whatever it takes to make sure those existing clients are happy campers. 

Here are a few simple practices that you might consider adding to your customer service routine: 

1. A week after a client buys a product or service, follow-up.

Ask them what worked, what didn’t. 

It’s an interesting fact of business but, sometimes, as long as people get the chance to tell you what’s wrong and you do what it takes to fix it, they may become some of your most loyal customers. 

2. Send postcards, letters, article reprints, notes, whatever, as often as you can.

By staying in touch you create a bond that will serve you well when you launch new ventures and new product lines. 

3. The most powerful yet cheapest research you can get.

Talking to your customers about what works and what doesn’t work is the greatest way to find hidden gold mines in your industry. Understanding very specifically why people choose to buy from you over others is the secret to marketing. 

Be on particular lookout for phrases like…that’s how we’ve always done it or we don’t like it but we’ve just come to live with it. 

4. Schedule routine maintenance appointments or calls with your clients. 

Often after your clients have been enjoying your product or service they forget how much value it is bringing them. Find a way to build regular meetings with your clients into your service. Use the time to educate them on just how much you have done for them. (How much weight have they lost, how much money have they saved, how much more efficient are they, how much more business they now have, how much of what ever it is that you do) 

They will appreciate the time and it is a great way to introduce new products and ask for testimonials and referrals. 

5. Find out everything you can about your clients. 

Don’t stop at name, rank and serial number. Devise a method for collecting personal information about your clients. Information about a client’s spouse, children, hobbies, schools, community involvement can be a tremendous way to further your relationship and offer clues for networking and referrals. 

You don’t have to be intrusive or nosey to make this strategy work, sometimes you just have to be observant. Most people wear their allegiances on their sleeve. Any sales trainer worth a darn will tell you to look for ways to strike a common bond with a prospect as a selling tool, I find that as a customer service tool you are simply looking for ways to get a deeper understanding of the needs of your client as a way to uncover more ways to help them get what they want.   

About the Author

John Jantsch is a marketing coach and creator of the Duct Tape Marketing System. Download your free copy of “How To Create the Ultimate Small Business Marketing System in 7 Simple Steps” at http://www.DuctTapeMarketing.com.