4 Ways To Turn Every Customer Interaction Into A Business Opportunity

To grow your business and ensure that it will stay operational for a long time, you need to turn every customer interaction into a business opportunity. If you're having that kind of trouble, you may want to follow this quick guide.

1. Upsell, get feedback, deescalate, and promote when interacting directly

There are varying reasons why your customer may want to interact, engage, or contact you directly. Some of those reasons are when they want to request help, vent their frustration, know more about your product, perform repeat business, or even ask for special treatment.

Depending on the type of direct interaction they have with you, you must act accordingly and turn them into a business opportunity. If you have a small contact center dealing with your customer calls, you may want to take advantage of conversation intelligence technology. It's an improved version of call tracking, and it takes advantage of AI.

Software with conversation intelligence can record, transcribe, and analyze calls you make and receive. Through its analytical processes, you can gain plenty of business data that your marketing, customer service, and sales teams can use later to improve their work.

On top of conversation intelligence, you may want to deal with direct customer interactions properly to find a business opportunity. Here are some of the most common direct exchanges you will deal with.

• Talking with customer support: This might happen through calls, chat, or email. In this case, ensure to deal with your customer's concerns before thinking about getting something out of the interaction. Once you resolve their issues, you can turn this opportunity to provide you with feedback, upsell, or recommend a friend.
• Leaving bad reviews or calling to complain: These situations may lead to two possible results: attrition or retention. Tread carefully here; de-escalate the issue, utilize customer retention strategies, and turn the dissatisfied customer into a satisfied one. Remember that finding a new customer is seven times more expensive than keeping a current one. (1)
• Repeat business: This kind of interaction is a business opportunity by itself. However, you can still make the most out of this situation by making your customer feel great when repeating business with you. After all, customers who have the initiative to do repeat business with you allow you to save marketing costs, make them spend more money, turn them into loyal customers, and convert them into promoters.

2. Attract prospects looking for information

While prospects aren't precisely customers yet, while they're looking for information about your business, product, or service, it's the first interaction that you should immediately turn into a business opportunity. This initial interaction is often referred to as the presale stage, and you should ensure that they find the information they need and guide them on their sales journey with you.

Ensure that you put all the stops when it comes to providing all pieces of information your prospects need. For instance, you should ensure that all information on your website, like your contact details, should continually be updated. You may also want to provide helpful content in the form of eBooks, reports, whitepapers, and self-help articles.

Never forget to add call-to-actions (CTAs) on your website and informational content. This ensures that these prospects will know what they need to do to become one of your customers. Be mindful of how you place and create your CTAs, and don't just write your call-to-action line or button absentmindedly. Using a red CTA button can outperform a green one by 21%. (2)

3. Make prospects only look at you when they're trying to find alternatives

There will be times that you'll fail to turn a prospect into a customer during the pre-sale stage or when they're researching you. However, it doesn't mean that it's over. They might be just checking out the competition and see if you're the better or best choice.

At this stage, you're not interacting with prospects or customers, but if you want to generate a business opportunity, you must attract them to engage back to you once more. A few things you can do are to run effective customer review campaigns, improve your online presence, and make it easy for them to contact someone in your company if they need to ask questions.

If you want them to consider choosing you, you must ensure that your reputation precedes you and your business. People must have favorable opinions and perceptions of your products and services.

4. Take advantage when you're onboarding new customers

Depending on the product or service you provide, your new customers may require to undergo an onboarding process. For example, if your product is an app, they'll deal with a welcome and tutorial page when they open your app for the first time. If you're selling products online, their onboarding process may be in the form of a thank you letter when they receive their orders or when they create an account on your e-commerce site for the first time. (3)

Whatever your onboarding process is, it's another customer interaction wherein you can turn into a business opportunity. For instance, you can entice a new customer to order again from your e-commerce website by sending a coupon code on their first shipped product.

Endnote

Whenever your prospects or customers try to engage and interact with your business, you should always ensure that you take advantage of it. You should remember that a business opportunity is different from a sales opportunity. You don't need to turn every customer interaction into an opportunity to upsell. Sometimes, making customer extras satisfied or gathering crucial business intelligence through the exchanges are as good a business opportunity you can leverage.

References

1. "Cost Of Acquiring New Customers Vs. Retaining," Source: https://www.signalmind.com/infographics/cost-acquiring-new-customers-vs-retaining
2. "The Button Color A/B Test: Red Beats Green," Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/20566/the-button-color-a-b-test-red-beats-green.aspx
3. "Customer Onboarding Steps And Examples: Comprehensive Guide," Source: https://www.engagebay.com/blog/customer-onboarding/