How do you keep customers happy?

It’s a question we often ponder at Paperstone HQ. As a small business, with tight margins and tighter budgets, can you keep everyone happy and still make a profit?

Here are a few strategies that work for us.

Free gifts

We like to give customers a little extra when they order. This week we’re giving away the famous Paperstone air sofa. Simply place an order for £99* and a shiny new air sofa can be yours. Perfect for camping, festivals, in the garden or even the office!

In our experience, it helps to increase customer spend, plus people enjoy getting a free gift. How do we know this? We ask! And that leads neatly to our next strategy.

Annual customer happiness survey

Every year we ask customers to share their opinions. We believe this is an incredibly important process. We want to hear straight from the horse’s mouth what people think – good and bad.

This short survey takes just minutes to fill in, but provides us with tonnes of incredibly useful insights. We find out what customers like and don’t like, and the reasons people shop with us (or our competitors).

It’s win-win as for every completed survey we give money to charity raising thousands of pounds in the process.

Looking at the results helps us base our approach on real intel, rather than what we come up with in a brainstorming session.

Honest and open communication

We aim to be clear and transparent in all our communications – to customers, suppliers and team members. It’s easy to say, but not so easy to do consistently. Our culture of openness and transparency means we hold our hands up when we make a mistake, and importantly, learn from it. 

Keeping our team happy

We firmly believe that a happy team makes for happy customers. Our team are the lifeblood of the organisation and the ones that interact with our customers every day. Our approach is to be as inclusive as we can as an organisation. Everyone’s opinion is important and listened to.

At our monthly ‘town hall’ meeting, the whole Paperstone crew come together to discuss our work and life at Paperstone. We also make a point of socialising together outside of work; whether that’s at our annual summer party or our monthly team lunches.

We like to give our team gifts too, little tokens of our appreciation. On Valentine’s Day everyone found a packet of love hearts on their desks. At Easter we all enjoyed a Lindt Bunny. These gestures are not expensive, but are really valued by the team.

If you’re stuck for ideas on keeping people happy why not order £99 worth of office supplies and kick back on your new air sofa contemplating your next steps.

*Normally available on orders over £199. Offer w/c 29th April 2019 only.