Customer Relationships: Key to Screenmobile Franchise Success

Why Are Customer Relationships Important?

Put very simply, your customers are your business. Without them, there are no sales, no work, and no community supporting your business. Building a successful franchise without building strong customer relationships will always be an uphill struggle. As a business owner, recognizing what your customers need, how you can deliver it and how you can follow up with great customer service when things go wrong are critical values to have.

For all Screenmobile franchise owners, you’ll already have heard many times how much we value strong customer relationships and how great customer service is central to our whole identity. This isn’t because we just want people to like Screenmobile; we also believe it delivers huge benefits for the business on an individual level and for the whole franchise system. The most significant of these benefits include:

Generating More Business

There’s a sporting adage that also very much applies to business: success breeds success. If you’re doing a good job for a price that all parties are happy with you’re probably going to have a lot of business, and the reason people find out is from other people. If you build strong relationships with your customers and the wider community in general you will reap the rewards through greater business down the line.

A study by Salesforce showed that 72% of people would share their positive customer experience with others. Mobile screen repair and installation is an obvious niche where people will share their positive and negative experiences, as it’s a very noticeable change to someone’s home.

Increasing Customer Loyalty

Customer relationships determine how likely a customer is to seek out your services again. Even for a field like ours at Screenmobile, people may not be calling you every month, but they could do every year or every few years, meaning your customer relationships are a long-term investment. They’re also a very economical investment as, according to the Harvard Business Review, the cost of acquiring a completely new customer is anywhere from 5 to 25 times that of retaining an old one. High customer retention is an intangible business asset that delivers consistent revenue over time.

Boosting Your Reputation

Though Screenmobile doesn’t have any nationwide competitors in on-site screen repair and installation, each individual franchise will most likely have competitors on a local level. In these situations, every potential competitive advantage is vital for success and having a great reputation is just such an advantage. Academic research has shown that people will pay up to 22% more for a product or service from a company they believe has a good reputation. This positive image of a firm in people’s minds is built up through a number of factors, such as advertising campaigns, and strong customer relationships are one of the most important of these.

Establishing and Maintaining Strong Customer Relationships

At Screenmobile, we are strong believers in the importance of strong customer relationships for the value of the business and the success of our franchisees. For any given Screenmobile franchise, relationship building is going to have some differences but also a lot of similarities. Here are some tips for how you can create and keep great customer relationships wherever you are.

1. Respond promptly to customer inquiries

When people send a query, such as asking if you install a certain product, what kind of color schemes materials come in or for a quote for installing a screen system, they are likely at the ‘ready to buy’ phase of their customer journey. This is different to just browsing or collecting information, as they’ll most likely have done that on the internet before. It’s always good practice to get back to customers as soon as possible (at least the same day), but especially when a customer is looking to make a purchase, prompt communication will deliver greater success. If you can’t give them a full answer straight away, send a quick message to acknowledge receipt of their query and give them an approximate time when you will get back to them.

2. Be friendly and professional

There is something of an art to being positive and friendly yet clearly professional in how you deal with customers, and it can be easy to fall too much on one side. Try to judge the tone and language of the customer and respond in kind. For example, if they are quite formal and use ‘Sir/Madam’, you probably shouldn’t address them as ‘Dude’. Similarly, there are easy conversation openers, such as ‘How has your day been?’ or ‘How’s the weather over there?’, which are friendly without crossing any lines.

3. Listen to their needs

When you’re talking with a customer, even if you’ve done 30 jobs that week, it’s important to remember that the only one that matters to them is their one. Take the time to listen intently to what they’re trying to ask or find out. Suppose it’s an issue with something post-job. In that case, this is especially true as there is usually a window to turn a potentially negative experience into a positive one, so long as you find out exactly what the issue is and are able to address it or plan to do so promptly.

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4. Communicate Clearly

While intently listening to what the customer is saying is important for you to understand the query or their situation, it’s equally important for the customer experience for them to fully understand what you are saying. If talking about a time, be as precise as possible. For example, if it’s Monday don’t say ‘later in the week’ if you feel it will be Thursday, this could leave them waiting for you on Tuesday or Wednesday. The same goes for products and capabilities. You know the range and installation limitations, so try not to oversell ‘finding a solution’, which could ultimately lead to disappointment, rather than simply stating what’s possible.

5. Follow up after the job is done

Whether good or bad, it’s always helpful to hear what the customer feels about the work after they’ve had a while to get used to it. Make a habit whenever finishing up to say that you’ll give them a call in a couple of weeks to make sure everything’s still going smoothly. Not only does it show that you care about them as an individual customer and give you the opportunity to get some feedback on the work but it’s also a great way of keeping you and Screenmobile at the forefront of their mind which is free advertising.

Conclusion

Customer relationships are the foundation of any successful business and are important for customer retention, building your reputation, and generating new business. There are a number of ways to ensure that you are building and maintaining customer relationships the right way by making them feel valued and listened to. You should always try to get back to them as promptly as possible while also being as clear as you can about whatever they’ve asked you. It’s also key to stay positive and friendly, though still with a professional approach.

If you’re not already a Screenmobile franchisee, why not consider joining our franchise family today? We provide our franchisees with as much support as possible because we want them to be as successful as possible. To find out more about what becoming a Screenmobile franchisee means and how to make it happen, you can read more about it here or talk to our team.