10 Ways to Make Customers Fall in Love with Your Business

via blog.kissmetrics.com

Nurturing relationships with your customers is a crucial part of growing a successful business. In this age of automation and innovation, caring for your customers has never been more important.

At any moment, an unhappy customer can share their opinion with the masses through social media and the web and negatively affect your business. That’s why it’s even more important than ever to create an excellent experience for your customers to help develop your company’s relationship with them into love.

Walt Disney said it best, “Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.” Creating love between your company and your customers can help scale positive word of mouth that’s absolutely priceless.

Creating a customer-focused culture of this nature is a business opportunity that should not be overlooked. Most businesses are failing when it comes to the customer experience, which is your opportunity to swoop in and enchant those same customers into falling for your company.

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How to Get Customers Doing Your Marketing For You

via openforum.com

Having raving fans isn’t enough. You need to arm your customers with easy ways to advocate for you, because if handled right, your happy customers can become your strongest marketing force.

I recently bought a pair of Vibram FiveFingers shoes for myself. You know, those crazy shoes that look like finger-gloves for your feet? I knew my family would have a lot to say about them. When my wife started in about the shoes, I was not only able to defeat the “attack,” but I was able to convert my wife into a fan. The company had armed me with so many marketing resources in advance that I became a natural spokesperson.

This is precisely what you need to do: Convert your customers into advocates for your products, even (or especially) if you don’t sell funny looking foot apparel. Here’s how.

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9 Common Misconceptions about Users

via paulolyslager.com

Many website owners have persistent misconceptions about users, which could lead to a bad interface design and overall user experience. During meetings, when discussing new features or reviewing an existing one, website owners and managers often use their own experience and behavioral habits with a website to praise or shoot down the idea. How many times did you hear someone say: “I wouldn’t use this feature so why are we implementing it” or “I use the application differently and I’m pretty sure the users do the same thing as me”?

Sometimes it’s necessary to remind website owners and managers that we (including me) are not typical users of our own product. It is nearly impossible to look at it objectively because we’re using this product every single day. It’s time to get this and other misconceptions about users out of the world.

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How to Find Enough Work to Keep an Entire Agency Busy

via freelanceswitch.com

When you’ve got a whole team working at your agency, you have to make sure that you have enough projects to keep them all busy. If you don’t, idle employees can hurt your bottom line and freelancers can go elsewhere. But some of the problems that go along with freelancing — particularly the feast and famine cycles — are present in agencies, only written bigger.

As a general rule, a freelancer shouldn’t even consider establishing an agency until she’s consistently overwhelmed with work of her own. That’s the easiest way to know that you’ll have enough work to at least start bringing another person on board. But you’re going to have to shift your client attraction strategies to bring in big work more often.

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Your Customers Are Going Mobile – Shouldn't You?

via inspirationfeed.com

In the not-too-distant past, people depended on their computers to find out all they thought they needed to know. Each morning, they cranked up the desktop to take a quick look at everything from breaking news to baseball box scores to Facebook updates. And when they were away from home, they dutifully lugged their laptops along with them so they could keep up with what was happening in their world and around the world.

Cell phones, for the most part, were good for meaty or less-than-meaningful conversations with friends, family members and business associates. They were convenient and they were cool, but they weren’t indispensable.

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How to Impress your Client? A way to better Online Business

via dzinepress.com

It has been seen that there are few clients who give large pay to those who work as low quality workers. Most of the times, it depends on designers that how are they working and what is their speed of work. Quality of work isn’t the only matter at all times. Here are a few tips through which you can impress the client to get more pay...

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15 Worst Companies For Customer Service

via businessinsider.com

Some of the industries that Americans depend on most are plagued by bad customer service.

Utilities, airlines, and cable companies are among the worst lead, according to the latest results from the American Consumer Satisfaction Index.

Limited competition and the fact that many customer interactions occur after problems like service interruptions help push those industry's ratings down.

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Transform A Tablet Into An Affordable Kiosk For Your Clients

via mobile.smashingmagazine.com

Twenty minutes after unboxing my first iPad, I realized this device’s potential to revolutionize the world of kiosks. Ten years ago, my team and I worked with Honda to develop touchscreen kiosks for its dealerships. Potential buyers could customize their purchase with a few touches of their fingertips. While innovative at the time, these early interactive kiosks didn’t come cheap, running Honda $3,000 to $5,000 per installation. Today, we can create such a kiosk for a fraction of the price.

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10 Tips To Convert More Customers With Psychology [Infographic]

via inspirationfeed.com

Psychologists explore concepts such as perception, cognition, attention, emotion, phenomenology, motivation, brain functioning, personality, behavior, and interpersonal relationships. Psychological knowledge is often applied to the assessment and treatment of mental health problems, it is also directed towards understanding and solving problems in many different spheres of human activity. The infographic below shows us ten prominent ways to convert more customers using psychology. Enjoy!

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What Customers Really Want From a Small Business

via openforum.com

I can’t help but think about the movie “What Women Want” when it comes to our restaurant guests. Sure, on the surface, diners want good food, good service and a good experience. But what does that really mean? What do they really want? Not unlike Mel Gibson in the film, sometimes you have to get in the shoes of your customer – literally – to get at the core of their true wants and needs. For me, as a restaurateur, that means taking the time to dine out both at my own restaurant and at other places all over the country. Here’s a snapshot of what I’ve learned when it comes to what customers–at any business–really want.

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Freelance Web Designers: How to Deal with Difficult Clients?

via underworldmagazines.com

No matter how careful you are when picking up the clients you’ll work with, the chances are that at some point of your career as a freelance web designer you’ll have the “pleasure” of working with an obnoxious client who forgets to get back when you call on the phone or send an email, or has the habit of showing up with urgent “small” changes of some details in the design he/she expects you’ll do free of charge. These clients, even when they are reasonable, can suck all the enjoyment out of the project and drain all your creativity, leaving you wandering why you didn’t go to law school like your mother wanted you to.

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How to Identify Your Most Valuable Customers

via openforum.com

This past month, there was a “shocking” news item from two well-known, billion-dollar corporations. Both Home Depot and Lowes reported that if they gave customers better service, they could increase their profit. This has long been supported by studies which show a majority of consumers will spend more money at companies that give great service.

Small-business owners of growing companies already know this and work ensure that the entire staff focuses on it. However, not all customers are “created equal” and should not be treated the same. The key is to focus a company’s service efforts on the customers who add the most long-term value to the business.

To identify who those customers are, you need to evaluate their value in seven key areas...

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Freelancers: 10 Things Clients Don’t Like Hearing

via hongkiat.com

With a quick search on Google, you will discover that the Internet is filled with the rage of freelancers against ‘evil clients‘. But hey! Everyone makes mistakes, and that includes freelancers. And there are also things that clients don’t like getting from freelancers in place of top-notch work.

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The 5 Worst Customer Service Mistakes

via openforum.com

More than any other department in a business, customer service is subject to a slew of competing priorities and pressures. Control costs and making customers happy. Uphold policy while being a customer advocate. Try to upsell but stick to your average handle time. The list goes on and on. Unfortunately, attempts to shore up performance on one end of the scale can often lead to disaster in another area. Here are a few of the most common examples of where things can go horribly wrong.

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Tips for Building Trust with Your Clients

via sixrevisions.com

Trust is an important component of any relationship. When it comes to freelance work, trust can encourage a client to want to work with you again.

My software firm has billed over 30,000 hours in the last 12 years. In that time span, I’ve had to learn how to earn and maintain the trust of our clients in order to keep them coming back.

I’m certainly not a business expert. I’ve made some horrific mistakes and have had my fair share of struggles. I write this article in the hopes of sharing some of my experiences with you.

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Understanding Your Customers Through Research

via openforum.com

Most business leaders know the value of customer input and feedback. But if some recent developments are any indication, the right way to get that customer insight is less well understood and practiced.

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Freelancers: How to Work Better with Your Clients

via hongkiat.com

Working with clients all day long may sometimes lead to stress in a freelance schedule. Long working hours, impending project deadlines, and constant criticism from clients can really bring down one’s enthusiastic spirit. Thus, building a compromise with your client is imperative to the success of any project.

As the provider, you have to be honest, sincere, and above all respectful of each of your clients’ opinions. Without their project needs, you wouldn’t be creating any work in the first place. And don’t get me wrong but a compromise doesn’t have to feel restrictive to either party.

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What You Need to Know When Finding the Perfect Clients

via studentguidewebdesign.com

My clients rock! I truly care about them, and love seeing them succeed. They value my opinions and advice. We get along great because we have something in common – we’re passionate about what we do. Not all of my clients have a business that I think is just super cool, but their excitement for what they do is infectious.

My client list has, unfortunately, been infiltrated by bad clients in the past. I’m lucky to have had only three clients that I consider bad in the past. Note that I said the past. I didn’t let them hang around too long. We completed the terms of our original contract and parted ways.

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The Future Of Customer Experience – 3 Examples Of Virtual Assistants, Biometrics And Siri-Style Services

via techcrunch.com

The future of customer service is less about the people than it is the sound of a person or the virtual image of an individual.

Humans are just so inefficient. But they can be improved, too, through interfaces that provide them more automated capabilities.

Salefsorce.com is on the edge of this trend. It continues to acquire companies that automates an agent’s tasks to become more efficient and customers to experience a less odious way of getting their issues answered. This week it acquired GoInstant, which makes it easier for anyone in a customer experience role to share a Web page. It requires no plug-in. It’s simply a URL that connects the agent and the customer .

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5 Ways to Build Meaningful Customer Relationships

via openforum.com

After 11 years building my e-mail marketing company, VerticalResponse, from the ground up, I could probably fill an entire book with my successes and failures. But of all the lessons learned, there are five core principles related to customer interaction that I want to share. While some may seem obvious, you’d be surprised how easily they can fall by the wayside. Consider this a refresher on how to build meaningful relationships with your customers.

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