If you’re earning a lot of new business, but your fulfillment and customer service process isn’t encouraging them to remain loyal, it’s probably time for a price increase. But why should you raise prices when you’re struggling to take care of the customers you have now? You should do it because you have to. If you don’t, you’re probably never going to grow past where you are right now.
Here’ s how you make that happen with creating a full-blown customer subversion…
#1: Get the Economic Fuel to Drive Your Engine
Last year, I read a book by Dan Kennedy called “The No BS Pricing Strategy.” One line in that book hit me like a right hook to the EGO. He said that you needed price increases to fuel great customer fulfillment and to justify the price increase itself. I think if we’re honest with ourselves, we know what Dan’s talking about.
Sometimes, we try to cut corners in business. We want to cut costs so we can invest the extra money into growing our business. This is smart…unless the area you cut cost in is the area that will help you grow your business. Customer fulfillment is one of those areas. It can grow your company faster than great marketing because it:
· Encourages one time customers to become long term customers.
· Explodes your referrals through word of mouth marketing.
· Helps you earn online reviews, which help your search engine rankings and online conversions.
· Saves money on marketing because your customers become promoters.
· Saves money on marketing because the more customers you keep the less you have to go back out and find.
But to make all this ^ happen, you need to invest capital into your customer fulfillment. You need to hire a team of customer service specialists who know how to wow your customers, to resolve their problems, to respond quickly to their concerns and to ask them for reviews and referrals. If you can’t afford to do this because of your profit margins, raise your prices.
#2: Be Prepared to Thin Your Customer Base
A price increase will drive some of your customers away, but that’s a good thing. It won’t drive away the customers who really value your services. It will drive away those who are just out looking for a deal. Most of these customers would leave you anyway if someone else offered a lower price, so why worry about keeping them?
By thinning your customer base, you can invest more time into creating a great experience for those who are willing to invest money to get value back. The more value they get, the more people they’ll refer, the more likely they’ll be to keep buying from you and the easier it will be to earn and solicit reviews.
This will create long term growth, and the new customers who do come to you won’t be the customers who are just out looking for a deal. They’ll be the types of customers who invest in value. If you provide value, your reputation with these customers will grow and so will your business.
#3: Be Prepared to Rescale Your Operations
Giving great customer service and fulfillment isn’t just about hiring a great team of people. Business operations also play an important role. If your business operations are chaotic and disjointed, your customer service and fulfillment will suffer.
If your business operations are running like a smoothly oiled machine, customer service and fulfillment will be effortless. There will be less errors and your customer service team can spend less time putting out fires and more time building customer relationships.
So after you’ve raised your prices and your customer base thins out for a few weeks, possibly months, use that time to refine or restructure your operations process. Find the holes in your customer service and fulfillment funnel and get them patched up. This way, when the referrals and repeat business start flooding in, you’ll create growth instead of creating chaos.
That’s how a price increase can fuel your customer service and fulfillment and boost your profits and growth. All you have to do now is take the first step.
Why not do it today?
