Member Article

The Customer is king

Alex Pusco entered the online trading platform market in 2001 as a one-man-band. Today, his firm is 120 strong with offices in three European countries.

I founded my business, ActivTrades in 2001. Since then the operation has grown to offices in three countries, 120 staff and 35,000 clients. I believe my success, in terms of building my company, has come about primarily due to an excellent customer service – look after your customers well and they will continue to do business with you and positive word of mouth will spread. Indeed, human relations are the most important part of this job. When doing business with someone, we must take our time to get to know our client – perhaps more than is needed at times.

The advent of the internet means there is perhaps less direct face-to-face interaction within business, but the principle of good customer service, ensuring the customer knows they are valued and respected, as the cornerstone of a good operation remains.

The majority of customer interaction at ActivTrades tends to be done over the phone, and there are plenty of customer service tips around handling these relationships. The principal, and perhaps obvious, yet often overlooked one is to make it as stress free as possible for your customer to do business with you. This involves making sure there is always someone on hand to answer the phones – even at lunchtime and at nights.

Ensuring your clients want to come back and continue to do business with you is crucial, and there are two elements to the customer service you need to consider here: peace of mind and incentivisation.

By peace of mind, I mean making sure that customers are comfortable working with you as a secure and robust partner. ActivTrades insures its clients’ funds above the threshold provided by the Financial Service Compensation Scheme. Underwritten by Lloyd’s of London up to £500,000 as excess, it gives clients that extra sense of security around doing business with us.

Incentivisation means clients have that motivation to work with you and usually comes in the form of rewards. In our case, every time a client conducts a trade with us, they receive points. Points can then be exchanged for a variety of rewards such as laptops and televisions. Showing your customer you value their business translates into loyalty on their part.

The message here is a simple, yet often overlooked one: look after your number one asset (your customers), and you will always have a successful business, underpinned by a loyal client base.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Alex Pusco .