According to Oberlo, 52% of small companies struggle to find qualified employees to fuel continued growth. This is one of the many difficulties as businesses strive to reach their true potential. When you first launched your business, your main goal was to establish the brand and start growing.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen overnight. Here are some proven ways to reach growth milestones and catapult your business to success.
1. Use Customer Feedback to Fuel Growth Efforts
Acquiring new customers is necessary if you want to grow your business. Although acquiring new will always be more expensive than retaining existing, it’s worth the time and investment.
The “sales funnel” is a model used to visualize the customer’s journey from brand awareness to purchase. While you likely outlined the various sales stages when laying the foundation for your business, it is good to revisit this concept periodically.
As your business grows, the customer’s journey will evolve. By understanding these complexities, you can identify ways to better connect with prospective customers and gain valuable insights about current ones.
Focusing on each stage of the funnel – top, middle, bottom – can help align sales efforts toward a singular goal or set of goals. No one wants to be stretched so thin they’re doing a lot of things fairly well but nothing very well.
An important information resource for sales is voice of the customer (VOC) feedback. Find out what customers are saying about your products as well as the quality of service they receive. You can gather insights from post-contact surveys, social media posts, email dialogues, and chat comments.
Customers will quickly realize that you care about what they have to say. Over time, this practice will help you build a strong reputation within your industry. In turn, this will allow you to acquire and retain more clients, thereby strengthening your revenue stream.
Use customer insights to improve your product and support models. Be sure to share the insights across departments including support, marketing, and sales. The more everyone understands about customer needs and experiences, the more likely they are to successfully improve performance.
2. Take Care of Customers
Once acquired, you’ll want to keep as many customers as possible to maximize their average lifetime value (LTV). This metric gauges the total value that a customer brings to your company and is impacted by things like how much the customer spends on your products and services, as well as how much they cost to keep as a customer.
If a customer’s average lifetime value is low, they’re likely only making one to two purchases before seeking help from customer support and potentially failing to bring a positive return on investment (ROI) to your company. They’re also more likely to churn to a competitor.
One of the most effective ways to maximize customer LTV and optimize retention rates is delivering excellent customer service. A great customer service experience can offset a potential negative product experience and improve the probability a new customer will become a long-term customer.
When your support agents are responsive to customer concerns and effective at resolving issues, most customers will be willing to give your company another chance. Conversely, a single negative support experience may cause a customer to stop doing business with your company.
It’s vital that you invest in product education for frontline agents. This is a quick step to offering better-quality service and preventing repeat contacts or customer frustration. Product education is an ongoing investment. Each time a product or service is updated, it’s time for refresher training.
And don’t forget to upskill agents. This helps circumvent many of the challenges associated with talent shortages. You can then backfill entry-level positions using the available pool of applicants.
3. Offer Omnichannel Options
Meeting customers where they are and when they need you is the foundation of omnichannel support. It’s a pre-emptive customer experience (CX) strategy that ensures effortless, easy interactions for users in – and across – the contact channels of their choice.
An omnichannel framework leverages people, process, and technology to build out the number of touchpoints a customer can use to contact you. It includes everything from email, chat, phone, app, social, forum, website, and store. Some of these touchpoints are digital and fully self-serve. Others are assisted-serve. By offering an array of options you’re sure to meet the needs of all customers, both current and future.
A huge benefit of omnichannel models is that they enable customers to transition seamlessly between channels during a single service experience or multiple interactions.
For instance, let’s say a customer calls and speaks to one of your agents about a product issue. The agent provides some assistance, but this guidance does not fully remedy the customer’s problem. As a result, they need to contact your support staff again two hours later, but this time they reach out via your website’s messenger application. If you offer true omnichannel support, then the agent communicating with the customer on the messenger app will have access to the information gathered during the previous interaction.
Customer Support at Its Best
If you’re struggling to accelerate growth trajectory and don’t have resources to do it well, consider outsourcing customer support to a partner like Goodbay Technologies. We offer a variety of growth strategy solutions, including digital transformation consulting, talent enablement, and CX road mapping.
Contact us today to learn more about this exciting opportunity and see why Goodbay Technologies is the ideal growth partner for your flourishing business.
