Keep your customers coming back for more with a customer experience that sets off fireworks.
While good conversation and light-hearted humor are great ways to build rapport with a potential customer, guaranteeing their satisfaction requires you to do more than just talk the talk. To really charm the heck out of your customers and potential customers, you need to exceed their expectations throughout their entire journey with your company! It should come as no surprise (hopefully), that customer loyalty and satisfaction are directly influenced by the interactions customers have with your business. So, whether a homeowner visits your website or provides referrals, any interaction they have with your company should be an exceptional experience!
Exceeding Customer Expectations
There’s no doubt that exceeding expectations will keep customers happy. And while it may come as a surprise, maintaining happiness is one of the best customer retention strategies out there. By making even minor improvements to your customer experience, you’ll increase the number of brand advocates or lifetime customers your company has. To refine and optimize your customer experience, consider the following tips:
Ensure Your Website is User-Friendly
As your website is often the first impression you give potential customers, it’s important that it’s both user-friendly, up-to-date and visually appealing. A consumer will view your website as a reflection of your business; if it’s designed poorly, potential customers may form less-than-ideal opinions about your company. Ideally, your website should act as a convenient location for homeowners to find out information about your company. If your website could use improvement, consider these tips for optimizing your web presence:
Keep Key Information Clear and Current
Cluttering your website with unnecessary text or images can prevent customers and prospects from finding the information they need. Any information about your products, services, locations, business hours and contact details should always be as clear as possible. If a homeowner visits your website and cannot readily find key information they need, like how to get an estimate, they may leave your site for a competitor’s. Aside from ensuring vital information is easy to find, you should always check that your information is up to date. For example, if you have a gallery showcasing completed work, it’s best practice that the displayed photos are recent and don’t feature outdated products or services you no longer offer. Outside of keeping your information clear and updated, you can optimize your website further by adding a dedicated page for homeowner resources.
Add a Resource Center
When you have a problem or question, would you rather call and wait for a live agent, or browse for the answer on a forum? Nowadays, more and more customers are leaning towards the latter and prefer self-service when offered. By creating a resource center for your website, you can allow customers and potential customers to solution problems on their own. Be sure to post FAQ’s about your products or services and other important resources that may be helpful to visitors. If you’ve gone virtual with consultations in light of COVID-19, add information to your resource center about that process. Ultimately, letting your customers help themselves will be a win-win strategy for your company. You’ll be able to increase online support while reducing agent interaction, and your customers will feel empowered to find answers on their own time.
Communicate Smartly & Consistently
Communicating with homeowners before and after every interaction is key for providing a remarkable customer experience. With an industry-specific CRM system, like MarketSharp, home improvement pros can effectively respond to their customers with timely, automated communications. MarketSharp’s system comes with 40+ email campaigns, including follow-up and appointment confirmation templates, so that contractors and remodelers can support their customers in every step of their specific journey. Additionally, MarketSharp’s Custom Lead Capture can help you reach out faster when someone shows interest in your company. Custom Lead Capture allows homeowner lead information from websites and/or internet providers to flow directly into your MarketSharp database. Using a feature like this will allow you to more efficiently analyze and respond to an initial lead inquiry and keep potential customers away from the competition.
Follow Up on Customer Feedback
Your customers are your best resource for growing positive brand awareness. However, thanks to the internet, one poor customer experience can circulate faster than signing an estimate. Knowing where your customers leave reviews can help you respond more quickly to negative comments to address and potentially solve a customer’s concern. Additionally, it’s crucial that you actually take your customer’s feedback into consideration. Consumers tend to be more honest about their experience with a brand on a third-party review site, like Yelp. By paying attention to what they’re saying on these sites, you can gain actionable insights to use for improving your customer experience.
A CRM system like MarketSharp can help you easily improve your online review generation with built-in and automated post-job communications. Because MarketSharp integrates with industry leading applications like GuildQuality and Listen360, you can send automatically surveys to customers directly from the MarketSharp system. With this functionality, you can effortlessly gather and analyze customer feedback to determine satisfaction levels or identify unsolved issues. FYI: Collecting feedback is useless if you don’t do anything with it! Any response provided by the customer should be used to grow your business, improve your quality of work, and enhance the customer experience.
As a rule of thumb, you should never stop striving to improve the customer experience and exceed customer expectations. In addition to the above tips, you should be consistently enhancing your products or services, hiring the right people, and leveraging strong technology to provide the best customer experience possible. With a CRM like MarketSharp, home improvement pros can take advantage of features like automated emails and call campaigns to improve satisfaction and take better care of their customers.
To learn more about how MarketSharp can improve your customer experience, schedule a personalized demo with one of our representatives today!