It sounds simple but you would be surprised how many people will buy from you if you simply provide a great customer experience and then ask the customer to refer their family and friends. You would also be surprised how many consumers are willing to recommend your business if you would simply ask. As a matter of fact, 89% of Consumers would happily refer your business to their family and friends if they received a great customer experience. So why do so many business owners struggle to find new customers? Oftentimes they forget to or are afraid to ask. Lets briefly delve into why simply asking for referrals can be so powerful and rewarding for small business owners.
As a customer, your top level expectation is to have a great customer experience. By customer experience, we mean the product or service meets or exceeds their expectations. In addition, dealing with the company’s staff during the purchase process and also how they deal with returns if it is a product company. If a service is not performed to expectations, what does the company do, and how quickly, when the customer notifies the business that the service was not performed to their expectations. What is the company’s refund policy terms if a product or service is not satisfactory to the customer’s expectations. As a consumer, how you emotionally feel about the purchase goes a long way in determining whether they will go out of their way to tell others. Whether the experience is good or bad, customers will likely tell others about it. A bad experience often gets relayed to help others avoid your business while good experiences sometimes get relayed to others that is why an “exceptional” experience must be provided in order for customers to go out of their way to tell others.
What small business owners often don’t understand is that simply being in business and providing a product or service isn’t enough for others to want to sing your praises. Small businesses, often competing against big box retailers and other competitive small businesses, have to go the extra mile and make sure their purchase experience is unforgettable. Think about the customers that have come through your doors and how many times you received a referral without asking. How often does that event occur. If you are receiving referrals without asking, your customer experience is most likely high level and exceptional. There is an old saying that states that you have to teach people how you want to be treated. People have to be steered in the direction that you want them to go. What is meant by that is that if you are offering an exceptional customer experience, don’t forget to ask your customer to refer their family and friends to your business. As mentioned earlier 89% of Consumers enjoy and would happily refer a business if the experience was great.
As a business owner, if you aren’t confident that you are offering an exceptional customer experience, reach out to your current customers and ask them what they like and dislike about doing business with you. Would they buy from others if they offered the same products or services with comparable prices. Only approximately 60% of small businesses have an official website and many do not have a customer referral program where customers can share information about a business. As a reminder, customers are much more likely to refer a business if they have a great experience and even more so if they are rewarded for making a referral. Remember the WIIFM blog article? Consumers are more motivated when there is a reward for going out of their way do something for you. Why not reward the customer and also make it as easy as possible for the customer and their referees to do business with you and share the good news of doing business with their contacts. Make the referral sharing process rewarding and as frictionless as possible. That is where Dealium can help…
Dealium is a cloud-based SaaS digital referral marketing & customer engagement platform that integrates referral code sharing technology & popular social media platforms. Dealium helps create brand awareness, brand exposure & new customer acquisition opportunities for our small business subscribers. Dealium allows consumers to save time, money & oftentimes frustration searching for reputable local small businesses.
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