This post was orignally published on the desk.com blog.

Back in the early days when we first launched our online store, Bumblebee Linens, we were lucky if we got 5 orders a day.  After all, in the beginning we had no social media presence.  Our store did not yet rank in the search engines.  And we didn’t have a large budget with which to market our business.

In fact, just about the only thing we did have going for us was a strong commitment to great customer service.  And as a result, we put a lot of energy into fostering good word of mouth about our company.

One of the main problems with running a store online as opposed to a brick and mortar store is that there’s very little customer interaction.  So if you want to create a small town, mom and pop like feel to your store, you have to go out of your way to get to know your customers.

Whenever a customer called us on the phone, we made an effort to start a conversation in order to get to know who we were selling to.  We also followed up with every single customer after they received their order and asked for feedback.  And if the customer wasn’t satisfied, we gave them refunds with no questions asked and in some cases, we even let them keep the merchandise!

Because we were just starting out with our shop, we had a lot of time to focus on customer care and we never let a customer leave our shop unhappy.

Over time, our fanatical customer service garnered us a lot of repeat customers.  And after a while, we got to know our best customers inside and out.  We discovered what they liked to buy and how often. We learned their spending habits and their preferences.  For some customers, we would even chat on the phone, talk about family and find out what they did for a living.

Because we cater to the wedding industry, it was also common to have newlyweds send us their wedding pictures.  Event planners loved us because we were reliable and would always ship our products on time for important events.

Getting to know our customers intimately caused our word of mouth to spread exponentially.  And we learned that happy customers will happily spread the word about your business to friends while remaining loyal customers for life.

Keeping Your Business Personal As You Grow

Now that our shop is bigger, we don’t have the luxury of getting to know our customers to the same depth as before.  But we still strive to learn as much about our customers that we can.

Here are some things that we do to help us create a personal shopping experience.

• We keep track of all customers who order more than once in our database and generate reports regularly that single out our best customers.  By getting to know their spending habits, we can preemptively suggest products they might be interested in. 

• We take notes.  If we have a conversation with a customer, we keep a record in our database in order to make future conversations more personal.  For example, if our customer’s husband’s name is Derrick, it goes into our database.

• We constantly monitor our social media channels and respond immediately.  Word travels fast and it helps to use software to consolidate your social media conversations into a single interface.

• We keep customers happy even if we have to take a loss.  Certain delivery situations are often beyond our control but we always give the customer the benefit of the doubt and take responsibility.

Even though we are still a small company, it’s becoming increasingly harder to get to know and remember every single customer.  But by striving to make our business more personal, we have created a sense of loyalty and longevity with our business.