(Note: This article was originally published to JamieMcSloy.co.uk on February 5th, 2019. I’m going through an old backup of the site, which has hundreds of posts that aren’t currently uploaded. As I’m working hard on updating the site – and releasing The Vault, letting these old posts be the daily posts for a while. We’re getting very close now, so bear with me. Soon I’ll resume regular posting and then just upload these archives in one go.)
Easy Business Advice: Go The Extra Mile
Want a way to fix your budding business that’ll give you lifetime customers, have people do your marketing for you and increase your top and bottom lines?
This article is for you.
And it can be summed up by the title.
Go The Extra Mile For Your Customers
This sounds a little cringe-worthy as it’s the sort of thing that professors of business who’ve never actually done any business themselves would say to a lecture hall.
But there are a lot of people running around trying to “hustle” and otherwise flip products and services on the tiniest of margins… and that’s not the way to do business, long term.
Most people in this spot tend to be solo-entrepreneurs, boot-strappers or otherwise people who’ve got a “big idea business” that are more on the ambitious side of the realistic success scale.
And in all of these businesses, there are always many ways to fix the problem just by putting a little more in in some of these areas:
- Customer service
- Packaging/Distribution
- Shipping
- Product quality
- User experience (online/offline/wherever)
- Contact Information/Experience
- Dialogue with the customer
- Retention strategies
And all of these things, if done correctly, can be the difference between a big business and a tiny, out-of-business.
So what’s stopping people?
It’s usually one thing.
And If You Can’t “Afford” It
The most common retort to this article is one I’m going to pre-emptively address.
“The margins aren’t there.”
This is something most business owners will struggle with, and some, (like your resident small-brained blogger here,) take far too long to grow out of the wrong mentality.
Put your prices up.
Let’s say you have your dropshipping store and it’s AliExpress and you’ve got the same bog-standard Shopify template and so on.
Each of the things I’ve mentioned above is a selling point that customers will pay more for. If you bake in the fulfilment and the higher quality product and you offer returns and the like, then absolutely put your prices up.
Why wouldn’t you? Your offer is ultimately better than your competitions’, and so if someone says, “Why are your prices so high?” you can, instead of running to Reddit and saying, “My customers hate me!” you can say, “Well actually kiddo… here’s why we’re better than the competition.”
But let’s extend that…
You might think, “Jamie, I don’t even have a business. I don’t have any money and I can’t afford to buy my own products, I have to work a job so I can’t provide 24/7 service, etc.”
And the reality is… that doesn’t matter all that much.
Customer support is about giving your customers a better experience. It’s not about giving them a response in fifteen minutes. Trust me; the amount of times I’ve been on a live chat or phone call with some tech support guy who doesn’t know anything and can’t speak English… that isn’t what it’s all about.
If you take twenty hours out of twenty-four hours to respond, but you say, “Hey… thanks for your feedback. We’re sorry you have a problem but we’re doing X, Y and Z and we’ll give you a voucher for next time,” then that is good customer service (with a little sneaky selling thrown in.)
It doesn’t cost anything to make a person think you care. And you should care.
Final Thoughts
A lot of what I’ve talked about can be boiled down into the sentence I’ve just given you:
If you want to get a better business, actually take the time to craft a customer experience that makes them feel valued.
This is absolutely key to everything you do in business, and it’s where you can start to subjectively add objective numbers to your margins. It’s also where you’ll build lifetime customers and – to use a horrid phrase – build a brand instead of a business.