How to be of thorough use to your customers

Businesses should vie to be useful. It’s not hard to consider why this may be the case. If a customer gains a great experience interfacing with your firm, they are all the more likely to return and potentially use your services again. Additionally, if you give them a bad experience or make them work overlong as well as taking their money, they have less of a reason to utilise this effort again.

Remaining of thorough use to your customers should be an essential part of a company’s management. It can help you build something that is often missing in the overly systemised businesses of today - goodwill. Building this between you and those who use your services can be priceless, and it is an asset that is never saleable but very valuable, can degrade but is also incredibly reliable. 

While of course this may not feature prominently in your yearly planning, it’s important to aim your business in the direction. When you become of less use to your audience, something is going wrong. To that end, let us help you maintain this practical streak:

Offer them your expertise

Of course, giving away all of your trade secrets is somewhat like giving away all of the ingredients to your secret sauce. If everyone knew exactly what the seven herbs and spices that KFC uses in their famous chicken, you can be sure that while the brand would keep its popularity,

it would lose a fair share of customers and competition would become even more rife. However, as a firm, being of use to your customers does not mean pushing them out and hiding behind some magic curtain as if you are the only one able to access this profane and secret knowledge. 

Instead, offering your expertise through the form of a blog or podcast or through simple being a paragon of your industry can help those interface with that more. For example, if you manufacture and sell fishing rods, hosting a fishing podcast discussing the best techniques to get the most out of your product line will not only ensure repeat customers, it generates plenty of goodwill at the same time.

Give them viable merch

How many times have you been given a flyer, or a set of stickers, or a keychain intended to be used as branded merch and realised just how useless this stuff was? Odds are you threw it into the trash bin less than two hours after you received it. However, it doesn’t need to be this way.

For example, a firm that offers viable merch through designing promotional pens here, or perhaps notebooks, or something similar is important. There’s a reason Ikea is famous for their little pencils, as they are not only used for jotting down order numbers while walking around the store. Viable merch matters, and it can help as much as it promotes you.

Offer appraisal services if suitable

An optician will often test your eyes, sometimes for free depending on their voucher, without the intended follow up of selling you glasses as a default. You are free to get the glasses and leave. The same goes for mechanics, antiques dealers, and a range of other services.

If appropriate, it may be that offering these appraisal services can be a step in the door for many hoping to use you for a certain means. If you can do that, you will find that more and more customers come to you as a default consideration.

With this advice, you’re sure to be of thorough use to your customers.