Handling New Customer Enquiries
It can cost a lot to generate customer enquiries. To grow your business efficiently, it pays to understand how well you handle your first contact from customers.
Many businesses, small and large, overestimate how well they deal with first enquiries from prospective customers. Often, for smaller businesses, staff have seen how the owner manages enquiries, so the assumption is they will act in the same way. For larger businesses, the assumption is typically that initial training is now being applied accurately and consistently. In both instances, these assumptions can lead to a significant loss in business opportunity and bottom-line profit.
Why poor handling of new customer enquiries could be costing your business
There are a number of reasons why enquiries that are badly managed could be costing you. Here are three important to consider:
1. Customers have many alternative options. If you’re not helpful or informative, someone else will be.
2. How you handle first enquiries is a reflection on how well you produce your product or deliver your service.
3. Staff who don’t know enough about your products or services, may miss crucial opportunities to recommend them to ideal customers.
Where to focus your customer enquiry efforts
There are many aspects of managing new customer contact that need to be considered by businesses of all sizes. While these do vary depending on industry, and should be tailored to fit your unique business offering, here are a few areas to consider in your business:
Do you have a clear process that your front-line staff are well aware of? How often is it reinforced? How easily can it be referenced by staff.
How well do your front-line staff know your products and services?
Can your staff articulate clearly the reasons why a customer might choose you over a competitor?
Are your team armed with smart questions to help them learn more from customers and to guide them to have conversations that are valuable for those customers.
Is there a clear objective that your front-line staff are trying to guide customers towards?
Measuring your customer enquiry performance
When done well, you should be able to identify meaningful measures against your first contact customer enquiry. For example, valuable information to know would include:
Number of new enquiries
Source of enquiries (what forms of advertising or referral drove your enquiry)
Quality of that enquiry (the percentage that could be considered a quality ‘lead’)
Percentage of enquiries that took the next logical step toward a sale (for some businesses, the logical outcome from a first enquiry might be a sale)
If you’re not measuring some or all of these areas of new enquiry, it’s likely that you’re missing key opportunities to grow your business. Growth, by the way, that could be achieved without spending more on advertising or promotional discounts.
We can help your business grow.
At SME Growth, were interested in helping you to maximise your new customer enquiries. If you’d like to know more about our approach, arrange a free, no obligation chat.