Offering your customers innovative service and doing it with skill and expedience is the way to grow and retain your customer base. Whether you are offering bookkeeping or accounting services, or helping people choose an insurance plan, using software that makes your job easier, also helps you to lock in customers.
More companies are outsourcing their work to contractors. If you specialize in a service, you have to beat out the competition for that lucrative contract. If you’re successful, you may be inundated with work, and you need to be able to handle the load.
Every customer has to believe that they are number one and that you care about their business. If you don’t meet deadlines or finish the work in a timely manner, they are going to move on. If you can do the work faster, you can save your client money, and that will keep even the most demanding clients coming back.
Here are some tips on working effectively and efficiently while providing quality service to your customers:
More customers communicate through email than ever before. They are busy people who don’t have time to play phone tag or enter the voice mail system that drives everyone crazy.
Nothing turns clients off faster than not being able to get answers to their questions. Always respond in a timely manner, and make it easy for your clients to contact you through your webpage, blog, email or phone.
Have the right programs and software in place to service all of your clients. Have you ever sent an email to someone who wrote back and said that they couldn’t open a document because it was in a format that wasn’t compatible with their version of Microsoft Word? We’ve all gone through that when Microsoft Office has upgraded to a new version and someone sends an email with a file extension such as docx. It’s frustrating for the sender and the recipient when someone can’t open their file.
The same thing happens when someone sends us a PDF file and we need to make changes to the document, but don’t have a way to unlock the PDF.
Make sure you have the software to do the job, so that busy clients don’t become frustrated and move on. Investing in software is cost effective: it is a business expense that is tax deductible, you will be on the cutting edge in your business and your software will make your job easier and faster, so you can service more customers.
Ask any professional photographer how much they have saved since cameras went digital. Sure, they had to invest in new cameras and photo editing software, but their investment has been paid off many times over in the money that they have saved in film. The same technological benefits apply to people dealing with words or numbers. You need to be innovative to attract and retain customers. Any technology that helps you do the job is not an expense, it is an investment in you and your company.
Let’s say you are an insurance broker. You have to find quotes for a client who has a collection of rare vintage racing cars. Someone with that kind of money and an appreciation of speed isn’t going to wait around. Much of the information on these vehicles is in paper form, or on documents found on the Internet. In order to get quotes from insurance companies, you need to put the information into an easy to read spreadsheet.
If you are a bookkeeper for a number of small companies, you know that some people have a rather obscure way of keeping track of their finances. That’s why they hand it over to you. Don’t tear your hair out, let software do the work for you.
By using a high quality PDF to Excel Converter, you are prepared to handle a range of document styles and formats. You can take that customer data or research and import it to an easy to manage spreadsheet. You won’t have to disappoint your customers because you don’t have the right product, or can’t service their needs.