7 Secret Recipes for Guaranteed Success

Rahis Saifi — February 24, 2017 Follow @57rahis

As a business grows, it becomes harder to manage especially when it comes to issues of customer service. Small business owners should take note of that and use it as a tool to counter competition from the big enterprises, stay in the market and grow. Research has shown that over 50% of customers have walked away from intended purchase due to poor customer service. Small businesses can take advantage of their size in beating the huge competitors in the following ways:

Small businesses can create a meaningful, personalized experience with their customers; that is not possible with big companies. While big businesses spend more time with their investors, small businesses do so creating a personal touch with their customers. Being located in the midst of communities, the customers are centralized in a particular geographical location that enables the business to know and identify with them. This kind of conduct is of significant benefits to small businesses that companies can use to their advantage in achieving success at different levels.

1) Build Loyalty:

To begin with, customers can relate to the business or brand and build strong attachments that result in customer loyalty to the products or services. Customer loyalty to small brands and businesses has extended to levels whereby customers are becoming investors in their treasured brands (crowd sourcing). It also proves much more costly to attract more customers than to retain a customer. So it is much more important to retain that customer by making them loyal to your business by use of your personal touch and remarkable customer experience.

2) Drip-Feed Your Customers:

It is not only easy but very necessary for small businesses to stay connected with their customers. Small businesses can keep their customer contacts and follow up with their customers through phone, email and social media. That is in an attempt to inform them constantly of new products and services in the market, giving after sale necessary services and also giving them relevant support at a personal level. In achieving this, the business should identify who its customers are, what is going on in their lives and where they are located in order to engage with them at a personal level. It is, therefore, necessary for the small business to find the most suitable communication platform from which they can constantly engage their customers. This way, they show their customers how valuable they are to the enterprise as well as making them feel part and parcel of the business enterprise. That consequently leads to building and maximizing on the customer loyalty to the business products and services. Customer loyalty is a very important marketing goal for any business as it is the most important tool for success in any business venture.

3) Earn a Positive Word-of-Mouth:

Customers, through such wonderful personalized sales experience and attachment to the business, act as marketing agents for the business. Word-of-mouth can be very beneficial to a business since it works in bringing in more customers building a community and a family-like setting. That can also work in online marketing where customers post positive comments on the business website or social media platforms.

4) Small is Good:

Due to their sizes, customer support in big businesses is composed of a huge pool of marketing teams which may not be unified towards common goals. However in general employees give the overall image of an organization contributing to customer value. In this case, small enterprises are at a great advantage as the employees are few and able to work towards common goals of wooing customers through their attitude and behavior.

5) Hear, Listen and Understand:

In countering competition, small businesses can use customer feedback in identifying areas of strength and weakness in their competitors’ products and services and building on them to attain a competing advantage over such competitors. That is made possible due to the agility of small businesses and their ability to communicate directly with their customers. Flexibility and agility are huge advantages to small businesses over large ones. A well-tuned small business enterprise can easily outdo its larger counterparts in customer service, trend identification, product output and quantity control. The decision-making processes for large businesses is their weakest point, and small businesses can readily take up changes at realistic time outdoing big businesses in keeping up with trends.

6) Tailor-Make and Customize as Far as Possible:

Small businesses are able to customize their products to suit specific customers’ needs thus gaining leverage over big businesses. That is enabled by their ability to communicate directly with customers that are a huge problem for big businesses. Small businesses should, therefore, go over customer comments keenly and respond appropriately in meeting their customized needs in an effort to compete with the big businesses.

7) Adapt Faster To Race Out The Big Fish:

Small businesses are also able to provide more consumer suited products and services. That is highly motivated by the customers’ feedback as they engage directly with the business. It is important for small business to recognize the feedback advantages at their disposal and seek to use them to their benefit in staying in the market as well as competing with the big fish in developing their products. Customers in small businesses can define their needs, and the business can use such information to create more customer friendly or suited products through making the necessary changes that are not readily possible for big businesses. As a result, the small enterprises have an edge over other competing big businesses that have to spend a lot of resources in terms of time and money in market research, which is not at the disposal of small businesses. Small business can easily and readily adapt to new trends to suit their customer requirements and also respond to customer requests. Due to their small size, small businesses are able and should also respond quickly to their customer requests that are not possible with big businesses.

Ideally, a small business has a lot of advantages over the big enterprises in regard to customer service, marketing and customer retention. The small businesses can survive the cut-throat competition in the industry through selling good products and providing personalized services. Therefore, if you have a small business, you can still compete fairly with other bigger companies by following these techniques without being intimidated by their size.

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