B2B Customer Service Tips: 5 Ways to Deliver Impressive After-Sale Service
When you’re a business that caters to other businesses, you have a very unique ability to create powerful and long-term relationships. By relating to your customers on an entrepreneurial level, you can encourage a more intimate and lasting connection. We want to help you learn how to give your customers that extra special attention that wins their business for life.
And so, this week’s customer service tips focus on ways you can foster closer relationships with your existing customers. Take a moment to stop trying to attract new customers and invest that time and energy into increasing your current customer loyalty.
Our Customer Service Tips For Retaining Existing Business Relationships
1. Keep a Highly Detailed Customer Database
All businesses know to keep their customers’ information organized and easily accessible. What we’re suggesting is that you take your customer database to a higher level by creating extremely detailed notes for each contact.
Investing a little time in getting to know your customers will pay off in your ability to speak to them in ways that will really engage their interest. Here are a handful of creative details to include in your new comprehensive database.
• Personal Relationships and Hobbies
Where is your customer from? Is your customer married? Do they have children; how old are their children? Does your customer have any pets? What city does your customer live in? What does your customer do during their free time; what are their hobbies? Does your customer play any sports or engage in specific recreational activities?
Ways you can leverage this information to encourage continued communication:
- • Send invitations to your customer letting them know of upcoming events in their community that may interest them.
- • Email your customer a news article surrounding a popular story from the sports section of the newspaper.
- • Suggest fun, short YouTube videos about pets to your customer for their enjoyment.
- • Mail your customer a congratulatory card on their wedding anniversary.
- • Let your customers know of upcoming kid-friendly activities in their area.
• Business Details
How long have they been in business; what is their business anniversary date? Where was their company founded? If they have multiple offices, where are they located? What is their business’s mission statement or manifesto? What made them open their business? What do they enjoy most and least about their industry? What are some of their biggest business challenges? How many employees do they have?
Ways you can leverage this information to encourage continued communication:
- • Send a bouquet of flowers to your customers on their business anniversary.
- • Based on your customer’s passion, gift them an eBook that will inspire them to grow their business.
- • Email your customers reminders of staff holidays like National Secretary’s Day, IT Professional’s Day, National Loyalty Day, etc.
- • Forward office supply coupons that your customer can benefit from.
- • Share articles that solve business related problems that your customer is faced with.
These are small gestures that you can start making in order to build a stronger relationship with your customers. Pay attention to what personally motivates your clients in order to foster a more intimate relationship with them. Stop being the company they do business with and start becoming the friend that cares about their family and business.
2. Follow Your Customer’s Social Media Profiles
Is your customer’s business on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram? Follow their different channel profiles and be the first to know when they share or post content. Not only will you gain brownie points with your customer for following them, but you can also monitor the growth of their business in order to better serve them.
Don’t just quietly like their page and move on. A large amount of Facebook business pages get little to no comment attention; making their posts seem unheard. Let your customer know why you like their post with an informative comment detailing what you like most about it. Take it a step further by asking an engaging question to encourage a group discussion about the post.
Here are a few post examples of how you can maintain an ongoing and fruitful relationship with your customers:
- • New Product or Service Announcements
A business Facebook page is a great location to learn about new products or services your customer is introducing. Brainstorm on ways your business can help their business with the new features or products your customer will now offer. It’s a great research tool to use when trying to upsell a customer.
- • New Employee or Office Expansion Posts
Update your detailed client database to make note of new hires or office expansions. Again, you don’t want to be some random company that your customer occasionally reaches out to. Be proactive in learning more about your customer’s staff and facility news to serve them on a more personal and tailored level.
- • A Shared Article, Blog or Newsletter
If your customer posts an informative article, share that post with your followers. You will surely catch the attention of your customer’s eye when you help market and spread awareness on their companies posted content.
3. Publish Content to Help Your Customers
Become an industry thought leader by publishing innovative content to help your customers run their businesses better. Focus on writing innovative life hacks, detailed tutorials or a mash up of useful industry news to educate your customers. You’ll slowly build a reputation amongst your clients of being in the know (a bonafide expert), and they’ll start going to you with their business questions or advice.
Another way to foster a closer relationship with your customers is to feature their business on your blog. Implement a new “Client Spotlight” section on your website and bring awareness to your customers’ businesses. Create a list of interview questions for each client to answer and share their thoughts amongst your audience. Email them a link to the blog article so they can share it on their sites and remind them of the outgoing link you placed to their website on your blog.
4. Learn More About How Your Customers Think
You can knock out multiple birds with one stone by learning more about how your customers think. You can gather information on your customers’ business goals and gain the power to assist them in reaching those goals. Climbing into your customer’s head will also inspire your business’s offerings to better serve your customer base with future products and services.
Learn more about your customers by conducting a telemarketing survey campaign. Reach out to your customers by telephone and ask them a series of questions to better gauge their point of view and satisfaction levels.
In our recently published customer service tips article, All You Need to Know About Conducting Telemarketing Surveys, we showcase these direct benefits from engaging in a post purchase customer survey:
- • Analyzing the effectiveness of your advertising and marketing efforts.
- • Gathering specific information from segmented markets.
- • Improving customer service based on direct feedback from customers.
- • Learning the key factors that play a role in your target market’s buying decisions.
- • Gauging the interest of a new product or service in development.
- • Determining the demographics of your past, existing or future customer base.
- • Discovering why past customers stopped purchasing your product or service.
- • Understanding content topics or subjects that your target market is interested in.
- • Performing market research to determine market segments within a specific location.
Your goal should only be to gather information; don’t try to sell to your customers during the survey process.
5. Host a Quarterly Networking Event for Customers
Create a business-networking forum by hosting an event once a quarter for your customers and affiliates. Invest in some tasty treats and light spirits to entertain your guests and become known for bringing great minds together.
Hosting a party or happy hour every quarter will allow you to:
- • Stay in touch with your current and prospective customers.
- • Make introductions between your customers to see how they can help one another.
- • Bring in guest speakers that can bring value to all of your customers at once.
- • Showcase new products, services or features you’re introducing.
- • Build closer relationships with your contacts by continuous interaction.
- • Be a customer of your customers in the hospitality industry by hiring them to work the event.
We Hope These Customer Service Tips Help You and Your Business!
Our B2B answering service has been in operation since 1986; that’s 30 years of experience in the customer service field. We very much enjoy sharing our customer service tips with you and hope they inspire creative ideas to improve your business.
If you ever have a customer service question or would like to see more information on a particular subject, we want to hear from you. Email us here or shoot us a message on Facebook to start the conversation.