Running an international business is incredibly hard work as you have so many factors to keep track of—all of which seem to have an effect on your bottom line. For a start, there are a lot of time-consuming tasks that you need to do to ensure that the business is running smoothly, and these long processes might be detrimental to the customer experience.
This can mean that you are more likely to have a much smaller loyal customer base than you’d like, which is pretty much the last problem you need on top of everything else you have to handle. Fickle customers should be the least of your worries, so you need to look at ways to improve how they interact with your business. Therefore, here are four ways in which you can boost your customers’ experience with your business.
1. Ensure ease of use
Put simply, you are going to need to make your business easy to use for your customers. This doesn’t just mean your local market—but includes those in other countries as well. Getting accurate translators to translate your website into a range of languages; having your customer service team learn another language to accommodate those calling from a different country; and having shifts covering from early morning to late evening for universal communication can be vital.
You should also make sure that you have a currency API, to ensure that people paying with different currencies can still buy easily from your business, and to cut out a lot of extra accounting and time-wasting on your side of the exchange.
2. Offer custom swag
Offering custom swag is one of the many ways that you can improve the customer experience. It can help you to improve your customer’s overall shopping experience, from first look all the way through to receiving their parcel. Giving free gifts to them is a proven way to help you to build a stronger rapport, to keep your customers happy, and to have a higher chance of them buying from your company again. This can be simply down to the fact they are getting a little extra when they buy from your business, which they might not get elsewhere.
3. Provide customer service training
It was mentioned earlier that your staff should be more able to deal with international trade by making sure that they either already know another language, or that they have in-house training to help them learn. This can be vital—along with getting them professionally trained in customer service, which can help them to become far more confident and therefore will help your customers to have a better overall experience with your business. Done correctly, it can have a huge effect on how well your business runs overall and can increase trust between yourself and your customers.
4. Use surveys
Customer surveys can be an excellent addition to your business, as they can be used to make sure that there is nothing about the customer experience that you are missing. Providing customer surveys that they can fill out can help you to build a better relationship with your customers, and you should certainly keep their advice in mind when it comes to running your business around them. It can be invaluable knowledge, and you would be foolish to overlook it.
