With any type of business, maintaining and providing consistent and superior customer service is an ongoing challenge. For companies who can offer excellent customer service, they enjoy a serious competitive edge.
When running an online business, customer service can be a particularly difficult challenge, as you don’t have the opportunity for direct interaction and personal contact with the customer.
Forming a joint venture marketing partnership can help you improve customer service by identifying less than optimum areas that may exist in your current customer service scheme. In this way you have the potential to expand your customer base, improve your sales, and create a type of checks and balances system for your customer service plan.
Tenants of Customer Service
There are a few basic tenants of customer service that are important for any business to follow:
- Be a good listener - Take time to identify the concerns of your specific customers
- Make customers feel important and appreciated
- Give more than expected - think of ways to give your customers something that they cannot get anywhere else
- Get regular feedback, and encourage constructive criticism and suggestions
If you are not already following these principles, you’ll want to shape your company’s customer service model by immediately integrating these practices. Once these changes have been implemented you can embark on a forming a joint venture marketing partnership. Keep in mind, it will be vital to discuss these principals with your potential partners to be sure you are on the same page regarding your approach to customer service.
Checks and Balances
When you initially form a joint venture marketing partnership, it will force you to review all of your business practices so you can align your philosophy with those of your partners. If your business philosophies do not match, it is best to find out at the beginning of the relationship. You’ll do this by reviewing each other’s existing practices.
Once you have agreed to go forward with a joint venture marketing partnership, the process of having partners in this way will serve as a natural checks and balances system that will keep your business and particularly your customer service on track.
Having joint venture marketing partners will also give you suggestions of how to approach customer service you may not have thought of or may not be currently employing. The beauty of a joint venture marketing partnership is the sharing of experience and expertise, learning things from your partners that you otherwise would not have been exposed to.
For a successful customer service model to work, it is important to constantly stay on your toes and think of new ways to engage your customer without overwhelming them or seeming too pushy. A joint venture marketing partnership can provide information on various customer service strategies, as well as give you the resources to follow through with these tactics.
You may even want to share customer service responsibilities with your partners so your customers don’t feel bombarded by your attempts to make contact with them. This is only one option how joint venture marketing can assist your customer service. There are many more to be discovered as your progress with your partnership.
Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing & Consulting firm empowering business owners to discover and implement Integration, Alliance, and Joint Venture marketing tactics to solve specific business challenges and increase profits. To read more articles related to Joint Venture Marketing, please go to his Joint Venture Blog Site. He can be reached at christian@synertegic.com
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