“Happiness held is the seed; happiness shared is the flower.” –John Harrigan
When our customers reach out to us with questions, requests for help, or for feedback, we have the opportunity to not only forge better, stronger relationships with them by providing excellent service, but also by helping them share the love. In today’s society, our customers build their social relationships across an ever increasing number of ways: they are incredibly connected to the people in their day to day lives, their clubs, and their social media channels. This provides us an excellent opportunity to expand our own reach.
Every time customers have contact with us, we have an opportunity to pass along an invitation to their friends. We can do this by offering introductory coupons, referral programs, or by highlighting how much we value their patronage via social media shout outs of thanks. We’ve all seen offers to invite a friend to save X% on their first purchase, been asked how we heard of a company so they can thank an existing customer, or seen a friend tagged by a company on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. These simple ways of highlighting and valuing our relationships with our existing customers not only provide an opportunity to foster relationships with new customers, but also to strengthen the connection our customers feel with us.
“Shared happiness; happiness doubled.” –Swedish proverb
Humans are inherently social animals. This means the shared experience of enjoying products, activities, or events with friends actually increases the level of satisfaction or joy our customers feel when using our products. Knowing this to be fact, why would we ever let the opportunity to invite our customers to share their love of our companies go to waste? In doing so, our customers enjoy a perk, their friends receive a warm welcome, and we all benefit exponentially from continuing our excellent service relationship.
“We made a concerted effort to simply start asking people how they heard about us if we did not yet have a customer record for them. If they said through a friend, we asked for that friend’s name, tracked them down in past orders, and sent them a thank you note. Sometimes we included token coupons with the notes. The response was overwhelming! Customers really liked it and we started seeing more repeat business from the original customers and their friends.” –Crystal H.
Let’s call upon ourselves to make the most of our existing customer relationships and see what dividends it reaps for all involved.