Customer service is the vital ingredient for running a successful business. Without great customer support, you could impact their perception and quickly lose their custom.
In a customer’s eyes, a gold standard experience is much more valuable than the great product you’re offering. In fact, a strong customer experience can be a great marketing tool.
So, how do you improve customer service in your business and avoid a PR disaster? Let’s get started!
- Make your customers a priority
Your customers need to be at the heart of your business. After all, without their support, your top line would be suffering. Your business can only grow from a strong foundation, so it’s critical that you heavily invest your time and resources in developing a robust customer service strategy. It’s not an asset that should be underestimated.
By understanding your customers and identifying their expectations, you’ll be equipped to effectively and efficiently respond to their needs and wants. This is often easier for larger businesses with dedicated customer support teams, but it’s just as important for start-ups and SMEs to deliver too. So, make sure you assign this responsibility to a dedicated rep. Without freeing up resource to effectively communicate with your customers, you risk damaging your brand instead of building it.
- Map your customer journeys
In the digital age, the customer lifecycle can span across multiple channels. If even one bad comment pops up in your space, it can be detrimental to both the customer relationship and your brand’s reputation. To enhance your customer support, you need to make sure you are available at every touchpoint.
Overseeing the overall customer experience gives you the ability to boost customer communication. For some businesses, this may be over the phone and instore. For others, customers may exclusively communicate with you via social media. However, you should always make sure you are prepared to provide customer service through any available channel.
If your customers are showing up in a space where you aren’t present, you could lose out to your competition.
- Listen to your customers
Repeat after us: the customer is always right. It’s essential that your customer service team, especially those on the frontline, are willing to put the customer’s satisfaction before their own.
Whether it’s positive or negative feedback, it’s something a business needs to accept in order to grow. By feeding an issue back to the wider company, you can work together to fix the root causes of common issues. And it doesn’t have to be an issue. Sharing positive feedback and emerging trends with the team helps to make sure you’re being proactive and continuing to do the things that bring your customers back.
- Get all staff on board
Customer service is a team effort! No matter the department, every employee is responsible for maintaining and representing the brand in every communication. However, each department has its list of priorities, so it can be easy to lose track of what’s best for the customer if you’re not in a customer-facing role.
By communicating the importance of customer service and customer feedback to every team, departments will be able to change their approach where necessary to improve the customer experience. Not only that, it will help boost company morale and generate results for the business.
If you choose to establish the core principles of your business to every employee, it will guide your company values and inform the training you provide to enhance the skillsets of every individual within the organisation.
Customers are the lifeblood of business success – happy customers, happy business!
Next steps…
- Make sure you’re available at every touchpoint
- Assign customer experience responsibility to a dedicated rep
- Highlight the importance of customer service and feedback to all departments