Five Ways To Keep Up With Growing Customer Demands

Whether you’ve recently gained a name for yourself within the local community or had a video or two go viral on social media, you must be able to keep up with corresponding growth in customers, orders, and customer demands. Otherwise, you could be standing in the way of your long-term success.

For example, a growing consumer demand for your products or services is only beneficial when it continues to grow. Otherwise, you’ll deal with fluctuating demands that can harm your bottom line. It also means that you’ll likely be dealing with various complaints and lost customs as the demand for your products shifts for the worse.

As such, business owners must have a strategic plan in place to accommodate this kind of growth, even when it is relatively unexpected. 

This article will share some valuable tips and guidance that can be used to help small businesses cope with growing customer demands!

Set Up A Storage Unit

Ensuring that you have enough stock in place to be able to send out orders as and when they are received is the easiest way to keep up with an increase in customers. After all, it means that you aren’t scrambling to fulfil orders, letting them pile up on your dashboard. However, growing your stock is difficult if you’re working from home or if your office is on the smaller side, as you simply do not have the space for this kind of project. 

One way in which you can combat this, however, without having to move to a new business premises, is by renting out a local storage unit. Here, you can store products and stock safely and securely until it is time to send out orders. Alternatively, you can store seasonal products here until they are needed. Either way, it allows you to keep up with growing product demands without being surrounded by endless piles of products and supplies within your workspace. 

Grow Your Team

Hiring new employees is often essential when it comes to staying on top of a growing business. After all, failure to do so means that you’re likely overburdening or overworking your current team while simultaneously falling short of customer expectations. For example, a customer usually expects a response to their query within 2 hours. If your team is dealing with a backlog of emails and phone calls, this may not always be possible, leading to frustration among customers and cancelled orders. 

As such, now is the perfect time to consider adding to your team. When hiring, you may find the following quick tips helpful: 

• Write detailed, thorough job descriptions that clearly outline the role. This will encourage higher-quality applications from suitable candidates instead of those who may be underqualified. 

• Ensure that salaries are competitive and that employees are offered additional benefits, too. This, again, can incentivize applications from the top talent.

• Keep an eye out for those that bring something new to the table. A fresh perspective and bold ideas can change the trajectory of your business for the better! 

• During the interviews, encourage the candidate to ask questions of their own relating to the role and company at large. This gives you more of an insight into who they are and whether or not they’d be a good fit for the team. 

• Work with a recruiter who has experience within your industry to find the right kind of candidate.

Set Realistic Expectations Among Customers

Customers often have very specific expectations from the brands they buy from, especially when it comes to response times. A recent study found that 44% of customers are only willing to wait 2 days for a product to arrive before they would start to complain. 

However, by working to set realistic expectations among customers ahead of time, you can prevent negative reviews and frustration. For example, if you were a business that makes all products by hand, it’s only natural that this means they’ll take a little longer to send out. Communicating this with your customers and providing them with an estimated delivery date before they’ve completed their transaction can go a long way. You may also want to include the option to pay more for expedited or next-day delivery. This is something that many customers would be happy to pay for, whereas others would be happy to wait a little longer – but giving them options also helps to keep them happy!

When negative reviews do appear on your site (or third-party pages), however, you must respond to them; many business owners operate under the illusion that negative reviews do not exist unless you draw attention to them, which isn’t the case. You can also use your response as a way to resolve the issue or dispute. For example, you could provide the customer with further insight into why things went wrong or find a way to make amends. If this does not win over the person who left the review, it may sway a potential customer who appreciates your transparency and accountability. For this reason, you mustn’t be overly defensive in your response. Instead, be polite and personable and show them that you genuinely care about their custom and the issues they are facing. 

Plan For Busy Periods

Depending on what kind of business you run, you’ll likely be able to predict when there will be the biggest demand for your products/services. For example, a company selling sunglasses should expect a drive in sales during the summer months or when the sun is shining. In contrast, a winter clothing company will expect the opposite. Beyond this, the majority of e-commerce platforms will notice a surge in demand during Q4 or the holiday season. 

Being able to predict when consumer demand will be at an all-time high gives you the chance to plan and grow your stock. This way, you already have everything you need in-store when the time comes around.

Improve Workplace Productivity

Improving productivity and efficiency levels within the workplace can also help you keep up with business growth and development. After all, this ensures that all tasks are completed to a high standard within a pre-agreed timeframe. 

In recent years, automation tools and software have widely been regarded as one of the most efficient ways to boost productivity at work. This is because their implementation frees up time in your employee’s schedule to work on other, more relevant tasks instead of spending the entire day responding to routine emails and messages. 

Time-saving technology can also prevent stress and burnout among your team, which, considering that one in eight employees in the UK has taken time off work for stress in the last year, can also be instrumental in keeping up with customer demands. After all, it means that your workforce is focused and engaged as opposed to tired and distracted.

Final Thoughts

In short, there are many steps that you can take to ensure you’re able to keep up with growing customer demands. While this can be challenging, it’s important to remember that there are far worse things to deal with than having too many customers. Customer acquisition is something that the vast majority of businesses struggle with, especially in the current climate.

Furthermore, the strategies outlined above, from setting (and managing) customer expectations to growing your team and promoting productivity, should help you keep up with this surge in demand, allowing your business to grow from strength to strength moving forward.

Header Image Credit: Clay Banks/ Unsplash