This piece originally appeared on the GreatAmerica Office Equipment Blog forum. Click here to read other topics of interest to our industry.
You’ve worked hard to earn the trust and business of your customers through great service and proactive conversations about the useful life of their technology. But the current economic climate has caused many consumers to pull back. That’s why a proactive customer retention strategy is increasingly important. Even if you’ve tried to do everything you can to set your customers up for success, times of uncertainty can result in scenarios that can impact your business. Your customers may be hesitant to upgrade their solution, or they may even be tempted to move to the competition for a lower-cost alternative. If you don’t have measures in place to keep them satisfied, your valued customer relationships and business are at risk.
What can you do about it? One best practice is to take a step back from time to time and evaluate if your team is doing everything to retain your valued customers. Below we outline five areas to focus on as you examine your business practices and how you are approaching your customer relationships.
Operating with Integrity
There’s no doubt your goal is to operate with integrity, but how do you hold your entire organization accountable to this goal? Has your office equipment business developed and consistently communicated standards and expectations around how employees treat customers?
Integrity is important because you want your customers and your employees to know that you are committed to their long-term success. Publishing things like your Mission, Vision, and Principles will not only share your values with your office technology prospects and customers, it will also give your employees a bar to exceed with every customer interaction.
Training, role-playing, and providing feedback to your team will guide them to emulate the values you set forth.
Selecting the Right Vendors when Outsourcing
Are the business partners you’ve chosen to align your company with operating with the same level of integrity as your own company?
The right vendors are important because in today’s changing business landscape, many companies can’t do it all alone. Having the right partners in place ensures that the integrity and follow-through you expect from your employees extends through the partnerships you want to build. The last thing you want to do is trust another company to deliver a great customer experience only to be let down because they don’t operate with the same expectations of integrity and excellence.
Protecting your Customer Base
Is your customer base made up of recurring contracted revenue? If so, what are the terms of the agreements and are they designed to protect both you, as the provider, and your customers?
Customer base protection is more important than ever. Think about how competitive the landscape is in the office technology industry. Technology has crept into every industry and companies are competing over every opportunity. If your customer base is under attack, it’s crucial to be thinking about ways to protect it from the competition. Gaining agreement on contractually recurring revenue is a critical way to maintain your customer base.
Following a Customer-Centric Sales Process
Does your sales process include an emphasis on selling the value and importance of an upgrade? Does your approach feel consultative?
Are you building in touchpoints with your customers through a QBR (quarterly business review) process? Maintaining profitable margins and assuring you keep your customers for life requires you to continually provide value and deliver on the promises you make. Quarterly Business Reviews provide a cadence of accountability. They also provide regular opportunities to not only reinforce the value you bring but to also help your customers understand when new technology might be a cost-efficient and valuable option for their organization. QBRs can help you stay in tune with what is changing in your customer’s world, as well as their evolving challenges and needs. What benefits will they realize if they upgrade? Technology advances quickly and if your customer does not get the new version of a product in a timely manner, it places both you and them at a disadvantage. Help your customers understand what’s at stake, be it downtime, efficiency, or the inability to be innovative. Doing so helps ensure you are the provider who can bring new, better solutions to the table – solutions that will help them realize cost savings and/or efficiency gains.
Pursuing Feedback from your Customers
Does your office technology business have a way to measure customer satisfaction? Are you getting feedback about your performance, the things that you do well, and things that could be improved?
Customer feedback can be obtained in many different ways. In addition to the QBRs mentioned above, sending out surveys, holding a virtual video call, and asking a variety of questions to gain feedback on how your company performs are all wonderful ways to understand more about why customers leave you and why they choose to stay. You might learn what their greatest challenges are and how you might have an offering that could help. Or, perhaps it validates an offering your company has been considering adding to its suite of products and services in order to remain relevant. Having a third party execute a survey anonymously helps you to obtain unbiased feedback.
It’s important to step back and take an honest look at your approach to each of these areas. You’ll be surprised at what you’ll uncover and you’ll begin to identify points of opportunity. You may not like everything you find, but you must define a starting line to measure improvements against. They may seem trivial at first glance, but how you operate in these five areas will determine how successful you’ll be at building a solid foundation for your customer relationships, enabling you to earn their loyalty, and their business, again and again.
