Partner Article

How to keep your customers happy

Sean Blanks is the Marketing Director of www.cartridgesave.co.uk the UK’s largest dedicated printer cartridge company. By taking a systematic trial and test approach, Sean and Managing Director Ian Cowley, have created a Sunday Times Fast Track 100 e-retailer which manages 30,000 orders a month; ranks above all its competitors on independent shopper surveys on sites including Google, Pricegrabber and Shopzilla; and is the UK’s fastest growing printer supplies retailer in terms of sales.

A business is only successful if its clients are happy. For this reason we put customer satisfaction on a level pegging with commercial success: the two are reliant on the other. As a result customer service is central to our entire strategy, and in tactically maintained through three areas: pricing, ease of ordering and available on the end of the phone, email or tweet!

It’s all about the money

Customers are always looking for the best deals and thanks to Google that is only a few clicks away. So from day dot we made a price promise. Rather than running regular sales we decided to provide our customers with the absolute lowest prices possible 365 days a year.

This means we are lean and keen. We constantly monitor the market and are not shy of switching suppliers to secure the best prices possible. This results in savings for us that we can immediately pass on to our customers.

This means we are consistently the best price on Google. And once customers recognise this after two or three price searches, we become their go-to.

Finally we recognise that cash is tight. So we provide added-value offerings for customers to make things a little easier. For example we offer free delivery so the price they are quoted at ordering is the one they pay at checkout. We also offer a 100% money back guarantee so if for any reason they’re not happy, they won’t be out of pocket.

Reduce abandoned baskets

Part of keeping a customer happy is making transactions as easy as possible, from start to finish. Simplify your ordering process to reduce abandoned baskets and continually look for ways to improve the service in line with feedback. For example, we discovered that our customers needed at ETA on delivery, so we rolled out an order tracking system. 80 customers a day are already using this new service.

It’s important to meet expectations. Letting your customers down is not an option. For this reason we recently adjusted the cut off time for our free next day delivery service to 5.15pm. The 15-minutes-past detail might seem a bit anal but we absolutely know we can deliver on that promise. We can’t physically extend that promise to 5.30pm, such is the sheer numbers of orders we receive.

Make it easy for them to complain!

It’s rare that our customers incur a problem but if they do, we want to ensure they realise how valued their custom is and how keen we are to solve the issue. For this reason we operate as many communications channels. Our customers can choose from Freephone, email, twitter, Facebook… - whichever best suits their lifestyle.

We also employ experts. All these channels are manned by trained team members who can resolve 99% of all issues in the first call/email/post. This means there’s no protracted crisis resolution – the problem can be solved in 5 minutes. Our clients are after all as time poor, as they are cash conscious!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Cartridge Save .