Making It Easy For Customers To Contact You, Pricing Confidence

Customer communication is essential to the improvement of a business, so make it easy for customers to get in touch with you.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 3:55 — 3.6MB)

Topics discussed:

00:04 – Do you make this email mistake?
00:48 – Stop apologising with a discount
01:34 – Hiring team members carefully
02:00 – Removing de-motivators
02:30 – Having a quality helpdesk

Transcription:

James Schramko here with a business news update.

Let customers reply to your emails
Okay, what is with this no reply email address? You’ve done such a great job I’ve bought your product you send me the receipt, I replied just to say how great you are and I get a “Sorry, no emails received from this address, you’ve got to contact their helpdesk.” Well, you don’t deserve my feedback.

Business owners should get serious and receive emails. You spend all this money on advertising and getting people to call you and you don’t want to hear from your very best customers. So please, if you have “no reply at” in your email, try putting “reply at” or let people actually call you, in my emails I say “I answer emails” and you would be amazed how many people replied back and those people turn into customers if they’re not already, it’s a great business technique.

Make it easy for your customers to contact you

Discounts are financial apologies
A lot of people are price focused and they’re going to ask you for a deal and specials and savings but quite often a discount equals a financial apology. If you’ve got nothing to apologize for, if your product is good, if it does what it says it should do, then you don’t have to discount it and apologize for it not being everything as you say it is. So you can actually charge what you want and people will pay it if you stop this whole discount price thing. Don’t get dragged into other people’s price things. Explain to people why your product is an orange and not an apple it’s not commoditized.

Of course, the secret of getting your price is to differentiate. Make sure that people absolutely have to have what it is that you offer regardless of any other option available to them including doing nothing at all.

Motivate your team
Some people in SilverCircle this week asked me “what do you do if someone is not that motivated?” Well you may have the wrong person in the job in the first place so the first thing is check your filtering, how did this person get a job with you. It’s actually quite hard to motivate someone if they’re not already motivated, you need to filter for this. There are behavioral based questions you can use to check when you’re hiring people to weed out people who are likely to be unmotivated.

Secondly, as the owner or the leader of the business your role is really to remove things that demotivate people. We’ve all had a bad boss or we’ve had conditions that suck if you can remove those things and people are still not motivated then the final stage is you should ask them questions that might lead them to a conclusion that helps them be more motivated and if you can’t get to that point then you probably should part ways and free them up to go on and do whatever their destiny calls them to do but it’s just not in your workplace on your wage.

Use helpdesks
Final tips this week is helpdesks. A lot of online businesses utilize their help desk really well as a support center, I guess this ties in with what we’re talking about with making it easy for customers to contact you. Instead of putting a contact form consider putting an address to a domain that you own and put a quality helpdesk there something like Zendesk which is what we use at support @ jamesschramko.com. When you have a well-run help desk it’s a great place for people to ask questions before they buy, it’s a great place for people to deal with once they have purchased.

And of course if they once purchased before but they are not a current customer they can always come back and ask small questions and it’s a nice, warm friendly way for you to interact with people and you never lose emails to spam filters and stuff so get a proper help desk. Simplify your websites with all the forms, centralize, put it on a domain that you own, that’s very important and watch your customer service increase and be sure to put a nice friendly picture.

I’ll see you next week.

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