Without customers, a business is as good as dead. Customers play a very important role in the success of any business. Therefore, businesses have to be willing to go out of their way to please customers in order to retain them. Attracting and retaining customers is achieved when a business has great customer service. The following is a list of things that businesses can implement so as to step up their customer service game a notch.
Be Responsive
If you want to easily piss off your customers, make them wait for hours before responding to their queries. Particularly, when the issue at hand is time-sensitive. Avoid frustrating your customers, when they call in for help, by providing multiple channels of communication and responding to them on a timely basis. Provide a telephone number that customers can use to reach you when they have urgent issues. Also, provide other means such as social media, emails, and live chats. Encourage your customers to seek help using any of these means and match your word by responding to them in time. Moving towards being more responsive, ensure that you have customer assistants in your physical store or office. These should help clients who come to your office seeking help or additional information about your products and services.
Listen to Your Customer
As much as you want your customers to listen to your sales’ pitches, also be willing to listen to them. Customers always have a say about products they have used, their experiences and how they would like them to be improved. Asking customers to give back customer feedback makes them feel important to your processes. And, customers will want to buy from a vendor that they respect. Thus, it is important that you encourage customers to review your products. If customers have a platform where they can complain, compliment or make a suggestion, they will not be in a hurry to rush online and tarnish your reputation.
Personalize Relationships
We are at a time where everything is digitalized. Many businesses have discovered efficiency in using digital means to communicate with their customers. This idea is overused to an extent where businesses no longer find the need to create a personal relationship with customers. This can be very dangerous. Customers, being human long for personal connections. If every time customers are directed to FAQs to address their concerns, they will easily get bored. Therefore, ensure to keep business personal by relating directly with your customers. You will be surprised how something small as commenting on a clients’ post on social media can have a great impact on customer retention.
Investing in Customer Service Skills’ Training
Employees handle customers on an everyday basis and providing excellent customer service requires that they are properly trained on customer service skills. Investing in training and seminars to instill these skills might seem costly to your business but in the long run, it really pays off. Your employees should have good communication skills. They need to be clear in their speech so that clients don’t misunderstand them and end up being disappointed. Also, it is important to test the product knowledge of your employees. Besides, how are they to persuade others to buy a product when they themselves don’t understand what it is all about? The customer service team should also be highly-adaptive so that they are able to deal with different clients efficiently.
Customers are with you long term. Therefore, improving customer service should not an ongoing process. If your customer service is great, customers will spread word about you. In this way, you are able to get more clients while enhancing loyalty.
About Kara Masterson:
Kara Masterson is a freelance writer from Utah. She enjoys Tennis and spending time with her family.
