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Dan’s comment: We wanted to kick the Helloify Customer Happiness blog off with a bang, so we asked 50 smart entrepreneurs for a specific tactic on growing your business through customer happiness.

Because there is so much valuable info in these replies, we’ve decided to break it up into a few posts. Here are the first 10, including tips from Rand Fishkin and John Lee Dumas.

We’ll be sending 10 out each week, feel free to jump on our list on the left to get the updates. Now over to the experts. Dan Norris, Co-founder Helloify

All 50 customer happiness tips

41. Pay attention to how you make people feel

Jayson Gaignard – MMTPodcast.comrsz_jaysongaignard2

Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.

Somethings don’t come down to tactics unfortunately. They just come down to giving a damn.

Tweet: Pay attention to how you make people feel. Jayson Gaignard on customer happiness via @helloify CLICK TO TWEET THIS 

42.  Create free tools for your customers

Alan VanToai – www.SimpleCrew

rsz_download

One of my favorite tactics we’ve employed that I’m looking forward to repeating is creating free tools / downloads for our customers.

The one we already shipped is called FacebookInviteAll. It’s a little browser extension that lets you easily select all your friends when inviting people to join Facebook Events or Pages.

Our customers and their teams use a lot of Facebook invites, and we noticed they were having their team members use a copy/paste javascript code in the URL bar.

The browser extension does the same code with the click of a button, and saves the teams some time and headache.

The extension only cost us about $100 to have build on oDesk, and our customers LOVE it. We use it as a touch-point email to customers in their free trials, and also as a free gift to prospective customers who aren’t using our main product yet.

Tweet: Create free tools  for your customers. Alan VanToai on customer happiness via @helloify CLICK TO TWEET THIS

43. Support customers with urgent needs

Chris Bajda – www.GroovyGroomsmenGifts.comrsz_1images

We sell groomsmen gifts and many of our customers procrastinate and order gifts for their wedding party a week or two before their wedding day.

If you go out of your way to help these customers and get them their products in time for their wedding they become advocates of your brand. We’ve seen lots of positive reviews and Facebook posts from these customers, and many of them have referred us to their friends that are getting married.

Go out of your way to help your customers and they will likely go out of their way to help you!

Tweet: Support customers with urgent needs. Chris Bajda on customer happiness via @helloify CLICK TO TWEET THIS

44. Use a VA to email engaged customers

Rob Cubbon – http://RobCubbon.com
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Of course, I respond to customer questions by email and in forums as quick as I can, taking care to spell their name correctly in the answer and address their concerns without resorting to a stock copy/paste answer. But, how do you scale that?

I get a VA to email the most heavily engaged customers and ask them if everything is OK. This not only provides rapport and feedback but also opens up a great new relationship that can result in a new testimonial at the very least.

Tweet: Use a VA to email engaged customers. Rob Cubbon on customer happiness via @helloify CLICK TO TWEET THIS

45. Make your customers philanthropists

Robert Noll – http://www.freudenhaus-online.de/

We at freudenhaus-online.de sell furniture online. Our customer often replace old but still functioning items with new ones.

Instead of throwing those away, we help them find charitable or philanthropic organizations that might be interested in giving the old furniture to the less fortunate. This allows us to create a much more thoughtful shopping experience for our customers.

Note from Helloify: Tony Robbins used a similar strategy in his recent book where he donates the money to charity and gives the credit to the reader of the book. 

Tweet: Make your customers philanthropists. Robert Noll on  customer happiness via @helloify CLICK TO TWEET THIS

46. Survey your customers

Neil Patel – quicksprout.comneilpatelsidebar

By surveying your customers you can find what makes them happy and what doesn’t.

For example, you can ask them a question such as “what is one way we can improve our services our products?” From there you can fine tune your services or product to fix the things they are unhappy with.

Tweet: Survey your customers. Neil Patel on  customer happiness via @helloify CLICK TO TWEET THIS

47. Share interesting resources with customers

Elisa Doucette – http://www.craftyourcontent.comrsz_elisadoucette_windsquared-300x300

When you find something that would be interesting or could be useful to someone, tell them about it.

I use the Send from Gmail (by Google) Chrome Extension or social media sharing to quickly forward articles and resources to clients and colleagues as I‘m reading or reviewing.

Takes less than a minute, lets them know you were thinking of their business and care enough to reach out, and provides a clear simple value. 

Tweet: Share interesting resources with customers. Elisa Doucette on  customer happiness via @helloify CLICK TO TWEET THIS

48. Send books to customers

Robb Bailey – www.pageladder.com pageladder-robb-bailey-ceo-co-founder

My business coach sends me a book in the mail each month with a personalized, hand written inscription on the cover page. There are a couple things that make this really cool.

First, I hardly receive any business related packages or hand written letters in the mail at all. So it’s nice to receive something in a brown box each month.

Second, my coach doesn’t just pick a random business book. he takes notes on our conversations and hand picks a book that helps me solve a specific problem or learn what I need to know to advance my business. this really shows he cares, listens, and understands my entrepreneurial needs. We started sending books to our clients last quarter the exact same way, and they love it.

Tweet: Send books to customers. Rob Bailey on customer happiness via @helloify CLICK TO TWEET THIS

49.Avoid industry jargon where possible

Ben Love –  www.grassrootsit.com.auvkbtfhk-

Avoid industry jargon where possible. Every industry has it’s own lexicon, colloquialisms and TLA’s (Three Letter Acronyms) that may make sense to you, but risk leaving your customers confused.

Worse yet, you may leave them feeling belittled or patronised and seeing you as an arrogant show off. Instead pay attention to the language that they use, and put your experience and expertise to use by communicating your complex knowledge in language they will easily understand.

Tweet: Avoid industry jargon where possible. Ben Love on  customer happiness via @helloify CLICK TO TWEET THIS

50. Send out cards to customers

Samantha Alford – http://go2travel.com.au/  rsz_samantha

Spend 5 bucks on Send Out cards and send them a gift on their birthday, anniversary, or for no reason at all. Better still, integrated it with Infusionsoft and do it systematically!

Tweet:Send out cards to customer. Samantha Alford on customer happiness via @helloify CLICK TO TWEET THIS

All 50 customer happiness tips

 

John Conkle

John Conkle

John is a startup entrepreneur who believes in the power of community. He has two podcasts and people say he enjoys reading a little too much. Before founding a startup he worked at a tech accelerator in Santa Monica.
John Conkle

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