04 Jul Business: The Simple Principle
A few years ago, I received an absolute shocker of an email which changed the way that I do business online, and that’s the topic of today’s video, how to make things easy for your customers.
Transcript:Â
Hi there, my name is Paul Barrs and welcome to today’s YouTube update. Now I’m here recording from the beautiful Mooloolaba Beach on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast sharing with you three very quick tips that you can implement to make things easy for your customers when it comes to doing business with you, and that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? We want to make things easy so that people will come and do business with us.
Three quick tips, grab your pan and paper. Here’s number one.
Firstly and foremostly, you must make it easy for people to contact you.
A few years back I received and email from a potential client. I’d been conversing with them, and they said “Paul, I’m trying to call you, but I can’t find your phone number anywhere.” It wasn’t in my email. It wasn’t on my website. I had an unlisted private number in the white pages, so it wasn’t there either. It wasn’t easy for them to contact me. That changed the very way that I do business. Now I make it easy for my people to contact me.
With my business emails that go out, my phone number is right there, quick, simple, and easy. For all small businesses, I suggest on your website that you have up there in that top right-hand corner. If it’s important that people be able to pick up the phone and call you, you should have your phone number right there, it’s the best place for it. And on your contact page, and wherever the heck else it needs to be.
Number one is you must make it easy for your customers to contact you.
Number two, you also must make it incredibly easy for people to buy from you.
Whether you’re selling things online, or whether it’s a bank account transfer, or whether it’s F-POS in your store, or whatever. You’ve got to make it easy. On my way home last night, I wanted to pop in to a local take-away, grab something, save me doing the cooking. I took my order, and I looked at it, and I got out some cash, but I didn’t have enough on me. I said “No problem, here’s my F-POS card.” They said “No, sorry, we don’t take F-POS.” I was absolutely stunned by that, for starters. So I said “Well, I guess I’ll just have to go next door where they do.”
These people didn’t make it easy for me to do business with them, therefore they lost whatever profit would have been in that sale, and it went next door.
Here’s the thing, folks. When it comes to online, there are different factors. Of course security is a primary concern, but there’s also perceived security. So you need to let your customers know, this is safe, this is a solid transaction. We will do, and we have done whatever we can to protect your credit card details online. Whether it’s an eCommerce shopping cart, or whether you offer products and services by subscription, you need to offer it and make it easy. Easy to find, and easy to do. That is of vital importance. So I’d like you to go back to your website and have a look at it from a customer’s point of view. Is it easy to contact you? Is it easy to buy from you? These are good questions that every business owner should ask.
Number three, very simply is, is it easy to get support?
If you go to my website right now, you’ll click on “Contact”, which also says support, and there is a link there to my support desk which is manned 24 hours a day so I can provide support both during my business hours while I’m awake, but also during those from the northern hemisphere as well. It has to be easy to get support.
Now here’s the thing, a lot of us spend a lot of time and a lot of money investing in good sales, good service, good websites, and we get that business from the customer. But what if things go south? What if their expectations were different to your expectations, or what you thought you were selling, they thought they were buying something different? All of a sudden, you have a customer complaint. You have to make it easy for them to get hold of you, and get support, and get it resolved.
A little while back, I contacted on online company which was one of those plug-ins for WordPress, and I simply said though their support desk “How do I find your competition? Who else can I use? This is horrible.” Within three hours I had received an email back saying “Paul, what’s the problem? How can we help? Tell us what happened. Tell us went wrong.” So I told them the problem that I was having with their plug-in and they immediately went to work to resolve that.
Here’s the thing. Yes, their service was spectacular. More importantly, it was easy for me to find the support desk. Setting up a support desk these days is so simple and so easy. I have more videos on my YouTube channel showing people just how to do that. You can set up your own and make it look professional even if there’s only a couple of you looking after it.
These are three very quick tips. They are in themselves, simple. They are easy. I keep these videos short. It makes it simple. It makes it easy for you to digest the information. Yes? Wouldn’t you agree? Of course.
Here’s what you need to do. Go back to your website. Go back in to your business and look at it from the outside in. Have a look and see whether you make it easy for people to contact you, easy for people to buy from you, and easy to get support when things go wrong.
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