Some stats which highlight the importance of customer service for every business owner:
The cost of bad customer service:
The importance of making your existing customers happy:
Your customers will talk about your service to their friends, family, and network – give them something “wow” to talk about.
We’ve built Designhill, the largest graphic marketplace on the basis of customer support. The journey from being bootstrapped to more than $1 Mn annual revenue, with a marketplace of 41,826 designers and 10,000+ clients – couldn’t have been possible without outstanding customer service.
Here’s how we use customer support as our best marketing strategy:
24/7 Customer Support
Our biggest advantage is our geographical location. Being based in India, we’ve been able to provide 24/7 customer support. We provide round-the-clock support to the clients in the form of email, live chat and phone.
Firstly, this human interaction differentiates us from our competitors. Secondly, it gives us constant feedback from the users.
We serve before we earn by offering customer support at every stage of the process – from writing the design brief to selecting designers and handling the revision process. Since many of our users are first-time entrepreneurs and small business owners, they are new to the design process and need help in getting started.
We offer dedicated customer assistance to walk the customer through every stage to make them comfortable with the design process.
As we cater to the global market and being an Indian company, our customers had their reservations about using our service. So from the very onset we made customer experience perfect and satisfactory every time they interacted with us.
We pride ourselves in being a customer-first company along with being a tech/digital company. In every marketing effort, we put the customer first.
Image credit – MarketingSherpa
Money-back Guarantee With No Strings Attached
Our business proposition is – high-quality designs at an affordable price. At Designhill, customers can host their graphic design competitions for which dozens of designers from across the world come up with design options. The customer then shares feedback, gets revisions, chooses the design they like the most and receive all the source files for this winning design.
Since design is a subjective matter, we offer 100% money back guarantee on every design competition we hold. At all stages, we make sure that our customers feel confident and comfortable.
While many businesses also offer a money back guarantee, they have many strings attached. It becomes frustrating for the customer to jump through all the loops to get their money back. With Designhill, there are literally no strings attached. We thereby eliminate the frustration factor.
So far until today, we’ve issued only a handful refunds.
Helping Our Customers During The Entire Journey
Businesses often forget that knowing a customer is an ongoing activity. Customer behaviour, preference and other factors are prone to change over time. A few months old data may not give you the real picture.
Today, customer buying decisions are more influenced by soft touches than hard selling. Factors such as engaging with them, making them feel special throughout the buying cycle, social listening and on-demand support are an important part of customer service.
How many businesses would be able to actually point out the real reason why a customer comes again to do business with them? Was it the product quality, turnaround time, customer support, the service after the sale or something else? Did the customer come to you because they were unable to find a suitable alternative at that point of time? Would the customer stick around if there were alternatives?
Positive Reviews
BrightLocal’s findings from the Local Consumer Review Survey are:
- 88 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
- 85 percent of consumers read up to 10 reviews before they feel that they can trust the business.
- 72 percent of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more.
These statistics prove the importance of reviews for online shoppers.
Have honest reviews about your product. A combination of positive and negative reviews show that you are not trying to hide anything. Imagine a website/product with only good reviews and 5-star ratings. Wouldn’t you be suspicious of them? However, don’t let the negative reviews overwhelm the positive ones.
You don’t need technical training to encourage reviews. Getting started is super easy. Add a review function to your website, micro-formatted for Google’s web crawlers. Claim your presence on local review sites. Ask your customers to review your business honestly on third party directories such as Yelp. Take action on the negative reviews and resolve the complaints while reinforcing the positive ones. In a matter of time, you’ll start collecting a wealth of reviews to support your product and business.
Conclusion – Adopting a customer-centric approach has helped our business grow by 2,000 percent in the last six months.
