After sales

After sales is a real buzz word right now, and is here to stay. There is a real trend for customer attention post shoot. Make sure your client has every opportunity to continue being a customer. Offer the greatest level of service of satisfaction. However, there a fine line between customer care and annoyance. Also, one between going the extra mile and overdoing it completely.

Just as there is a technical answer to engaging people while they are on your website browsing products, there is also one to staying in touch with your clients once they have spent money with you.

The bottom line must be – what is beneficial to your business? Long term and short term. It may be that some product lines require more after sales attention than others. In which case, there is no getting away from doing the extra work, such as album sales. There is also another solution to after sales and that is technology. Just as there is a technical answer to engaging people while they are on your website browsing products, there is also one to staying in touch with your clients once they have spent money with you.

For example, if you have conducted your wedding/portrait shoot and delivered on this initial brief, why not aim to sell more to them after this? Sending links to a password protected gallery for them to browse, share with friends and families, can open additional revenue streams. Especially if they can buy online from you. You don’t need to lift a finger to if you outsource order fulfilment to a print lab too. Many customers whom you may not have had access to may become a customer. Think the wider wedding party.

There are some solutions below but the main barrier will always be cost for a small business. That is what you must weigh up versus the positive impact on your resources. And when we say cost, there are free options which will obviously give you less depth versus those that cost £5 per month and upwards. Also, plenty of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software have free access for a certain number of users, usually on a trial basis, so everyone can test out their usage properly before committing to a paid subscription arrangement.

• Nimble. If simplicity in your operations is a key factor, this software will fit in quite nicely. You can manage all your online conversations in one place, one screen. It makes a difference when you are one of those people (most of us in fact!) that hates switching between documents and apps. If you need more functionality with other software, it connects easily.
• Hubspot. This platform has become widely popular in the last 12 months. This is mainly because the core product is totally free. Payment only starts when you need or want to add other aspects to it like their sales and marketing functions. For a small business these may be unnecessary options. Keeping things lean would be a great solution.
• Zoho. There is room to expand your users on Zoho. Up to 10, before you start paying. So, if you need to be flexible on numbers using the service this is a good solution. As a comparison to other services it is very cost effective. But it could get out of hand once the business grows, thereby needing more power to your systems.

The end goal to these kind of applications is to increase sales. Not to lose unnecessary time to poring over lists of people, communications, social conversations and ensuring data is kept up to date. And this is our wider challenge with all digital life. Not to waste time being led down paths of useless content when we could be more effective. That challenge is one for your culture as a person and a business – hope the draw of creativity with your photography will override this.