Business is all about building relationships. This remains true for hairstylists at salons, attorneys in law firms, social media influencers, and remote staff organizations that rely on Microsoft Teams, social media, and SEO practices in order to approach potential clients and thrive. In order to find success with your outfit, you will have to commit to the people who make your office turn. But business relationships extend out beyond the four walls of your corporate offices. It’s not enough to focus on internal cohesion alone. In order to create a robust business that attracts a ramping up of clients as time continues to march on you must improve your forward-facing services in order to deal with a complex matrix of customer needs and demands.
Tackling these business services is an essential component of any success story, so making this the highlight of your office’s new year strategy is a great way to improve upon your current stable of products and services offered to clients in order to increase your current brand loyalty and reel in more big fish at the same time.
1. Upgrade your digital services.
Upgrades to your digital infrastructure offer a great way to draw in an increasing number of clients. With the help of SEO practices on your blog posts, Microsoft Teams integrations for your OKR software to improve your workflow, and digital marketing and advertising research that includes keyword lookups in order to reach out specifically to your target audience, you can bag more prospective clients with just your online footprint. After all, most potential clients will be found online, and you need to make sure your content speaks to every first-time website visitor so that you can convert them into paying clients.
Research suggests that 40% of readers will navigate away from your page if it loads even one second slower than the expected two-second benchmark. That means it’s not enough to show up at the top of the search results on Google or Bing—you need to have a gorgeous, engaging website as well.
A great way to really energize your digital presence is to buy IPv4 space in order to create a dedicated network area for your internal team as well as your forward-facing offerings to clients. Conversion of website visitors into clients demands a highly professional appearance and a website that works, all the time. Having conversations internally about switching over to a dedicated IP space listed on ARIN or APNIC is something that all businesses eventually arrive at. Making the jump now is a great way to head off the conversion requirements of a large scale digital presence that will take days or weeks to complete. Setting yourself on track for success early on will help you efficiently scale up when the time comes. As well, strong digital branding practices with SEO research, social media presence, and an IPv4 address with staying power will help grow your name organically and reach out to new clients in your sleep.
2. Focus on your customer service team.
Customer service forms the backbone of any company’s ability to keep clients happy. Whether you have become a hair stylist and want to expand and set up your own salon, or you sell paper products to your local community, customer service is essential to keeping buyers happy and maintaining their relationship as repeat customers with your team. Keeping up with best practices within your customer service department or your own phone and cash register etiquette is essential to making clients feel appreciated and happy with the service they have or will receive.
This strikes at the first impression considerations. The things we do make a far greater impact on those around us than what we say. By always maintaining a highly fluid and friendly tone and attitude with the clients you are engaged with you will make them feel trusting and confident in your ability to deliver the goods or services that they need. Brushing off concerns or yelling at customers is a surefire way to disengage their interest in your brand, giving them a powerful motivation to look elsewhere for these services the next time around. A great way to think about this relationship is as if you were trying to make a great first impression during every meeting with your clients. A first impression is created in as little as seven seconds, but it lasts as a powerful reminder of the impulse feelings that one had upon meeting and interacting with you. If you are grumpy, disheveled, or angry, this attitude will stick with your client for much longer than the actual service, tainting their opinion on your workmanship. In order to create lasting professional relationships, you should strive to treat every meeting as if it were the first engagement. This way, you and your team can be sure that you are always putting your best foot forward when interacting with clients.
3. Ask for feedback.
A business that is unafraid to ask for feedback on their services rendered is one that’s prepared for future growth opportunities. This is a stratagem embedded in any well-read marketing guide for law firms and should form a significant part of your momentum strategy for the future as well. By asking for customer feedback you can easily gain a sense of your team’s ability to perform the services it strives to deliver.
A business that is poised for success should eagerly accept negative feedback as well. Instead of shying away from critical commentary on your team’s performance, you should actively seek out customers that may not have had the best experience during their last encounter with your services. This way you can work to remedy their personalized concerns and keep them as loyal customers while also distilling the lessons from the interaction into action items that can be implemented to improve the overall quality of the rest of the business. Negative feedback is a part of life; we don’t always perform perfectly, or even admirably and not every potential client will be an ideal client no matter what an agile team you have. But learning from our mistakes is an essential part of growth. Without understanding how we have failed we can’t hope to fix these systemic issues and make better decisions, in business, life, and everything else.
Improving your business services revolves primarily around knowledge. Learning how to obtain information and leverage it to help fuel growth lies at the heart of creating a successful business, and it’s the place where you must start if you want to improve your services and team approach to your chosen industry. Take the time to engage with your staff and clients in a number of meaningful ways in order to spark these new opportunities for expansion.