Shut the Back Door! Paying Attention to Your Customers

If the front door represents the entry point to your company where prospects turn into customers, then the back door represents weaknesses in your business model that provide customers with reasons to look elsewhere.

Back doors are often neglected. You may simply be unaware of the vulnerabilities in your company. Marketing will ask you to focus your time, energy, and resources on attracting new customers to the front door of your business. If you are successful, and customers are responding in droves, they still may be leaving through the unattended back door just as quickly.

Back doors are left open when a generic product or service is sold that doesn't focus on the customer's needs, or if your onboarding process is neglected. Your sales relationship with your customer may seem like it's going great; but if their needs aren't being met, then they will start to notice the exit sign. One way to help draw attention away from the back door is to communicate your products and services clearly. If you talk with your clients in their terms, and take the time to understand the complexity of their needs, then you can present a service that really means something to them.

Shutting the back door means following up with your existing customers and ensuring customer satisfaction. You can address their constantly changing needs by taking advantage of business technology solutions that are designed to keep you in touch with your customers. These solutions can help you keep track of your customers and communicate with them in new ways, which can lead to discovering additional and new sales opportunities.

Work hard to keep your clients. Go the extra mile and take extra time to listen to and pay attention to the needs of your customers. You can even do things like offering them free service and advice. This will go a long way in helping to retain the customers you already have. It's estimated that goldmining your existing customers costs one-tenth the expense of finding new business. The savings from marketing alone will make going out of your way for a customer and shutting the back door worth it!

There are new technologies that make keeping in touch with your customers easy. Solutions like social media and video conferencing make communication simpler. Cloud services are another great tool that allows you to stay connected to your network from anywhere, even while you are away from the office meeting with a customer. All of these great technologies are new ways to communicate with your customers, and they have only been widely available for the past decade. Additionally, there are new solutions hitting the market all the time!

To learn more about how business technologies can enhance the way you keep track of and listen to your customers, which will help you to shut your back door, give Directive a call at 607.433.2200.