In the building materials industry, marketing is not over at the point of sale. Your goal is to establish successful long-term relationships with your clients, maximizing their lifetime value to your company. With inbound marketing, this is known as the delight phase: after a member of your target audience becomes a customer, you need to keep them more than satisfied.
This concept is especially true for building material suppliers that are looking to build productive relationships with interior designers, construction companies, and homeowners. To maximize your impact with existing customers, here are four customer service tips that will help you build successful relationships.
1. Take Advantage Of Integrated Technology
Ideally, you should integrate your sales and customer service efforts using technology. If your customer service team has access to information provided by marketing and sales in your customer relationship management (CRM) system, they can react quickly and effectively to any problems that customers may have.
For example, an interior designer may call and complain about a shipment of materials they received from you a month ago. Access to technology allows your respondents to be informed about the exact nature of that shipment, whether it was the first time you have worked together, and if any problems existed in the past. The response, in turn, can be more accurate and tailored to the individual customer.
2. Abandon Scripted Responses
Here's a situation you want to avoid at all costs: a customer calls with a very specific problem they had with your building materials and your customer service agent responds by reading off a script about how you are not liable and the terms of a standard contract. That customer will be with a competitor faster than you know.
That's why abandoning scripted responses is crucial for long-term customer relationships. Instead, train your employees to know the items they would read off the script, which enables them to more freely and individually answer complaints. This places more responsibility on your agents, but will result in much more satisfied customers.
3. Build A Knowledge Base
Content marketing does not have to stop when a lead becomes a customer. Instead, build a knowledge base about common issues with your ordering software or questions about your building materials. Then, promote that knowledge base—which could be as simple as a blog or blog category—specifically to your current customers. You can also add a frequently asked questions section to your site to address anything your customers would need to answer quickly.
Building the knowledge base requires close cooperation with your customer service team, who will be able to tell you exactly what type of content your current customers typically ask for and need to know.
4. Use Metrics To Act Proactively
Ideally, you should not wait to address customer service issues. If you can solve their problem before they even think about picking up the phone, you vastly improve your chances of satisfying their needs and keeping them loyal.
Using digital metrics is a crucial part of this proactive approach. For example, Net Promoter Score can be a critical indicator of customer happiness. Calculating it means you can automatically kick unhappy customers off email workflows and provide them with additional content to increase their delight before they're ready to complain.
Customer service, in other words, should be a crucial part of your marketing repertoire. If you want to see your building materials company succeed, you need to make sure that you're not only attracting, but also retaining clients at high levels. To learn more about implementing each of the above possibilities, contact us.
