Tip of the Week: 4 Fundamentals of Good Customer Service

Customer service can be tricky to gauge sometimes, as you don’t often hear about a consumer’s experience unless you provide exceptional service, or if you’re not providing good enough service. The problem here is that, unless you do something to improve the customer service you provide, you could very well lose them to your competition. What are some steps that your business can take to improve customer service?

We want to share four of the most basic attributes of customer service, and how technology can help you take full advantage of them.

Make Working with Your Business Easy
Customer service is a part of your business that demands a team of professional, personable employees that have great communication skills and magnetic personalities. It’s clear that customer service isn’t something that just any worker can do, so you’ll need to go out of your way to find people who enjoy working with others. Keeping employees who are easy to work with in direct contact with your customers will make it enjoyable for your consumers rather than awkward. Technology solutions that let your consumers rate the quality of service received through IM or cloud-based portal can give you a glimpse of who is great at working with your customers, and who isn’t.

Go Above and Beyond
When you start a relationship with a new customer, they form a set of expectations about what they will get out of their relationship with your organization. Therefore, you should make a conscious effort to not only meet these expectations, but to go above and beyond them. If you can’t show your clients or customers that you’re serious about maintaining a high quality of service, they will certainly find someone else who can deliver on their promises. Keep in mind that exceeding your customer’s expectations, rather than just barely meeting them, is capable of building much more brand loyalty, which can turn into more profits and loyal customers for years to come.

Always Be There for Answers
Customers enjoy 24/7 services, but don’t always get that from the many different brands that they are associated with. If your business can’t always be available to answer questions at any time of the day, it might be helpful to implement some sort of portal that they can access for all of their frequently asked questions, as well as more information that they can use to reach out to you at a better time.

An alternative is to equip your employees with mobile devices that can help them keep in touch with customers wherever they are, but keep in mind that it’s unlikely that they will want to deal with something like this if it’s not in their job description (or the customer’s service agreement). While the added personal touch of 24/7 service might be great for customer satisfaction, it’s often not feasible for some types of organizations. Instead, it’s better to just implement contact points, such as email addresses, phone numbers, live chat, and a service portal, all of which should be able to either provide the customer with answers, or tell them when to expect them.

Also, don’t forget about social media; it’s more viable for communicating with customers directly than it has ever been before.

Create a Flexible Work Environment
Creating a work environment that helps your employees deal with your consumers is also important to consider. This includes implementing technology that helps them share information and collaborate more easily, which helps all employees who have access to this data be able to more effectively work with clients. If you don’t do this, you’ll create parts of your business that house specific types of information, creating more work for those who need access to it in order to solve a problem. When someone can’t get the help they need, they will grow frustrated and remember the instance the next time they seek assistance, creating a sour relationship.

Technology solutions are available that can make it much easier for your organization to deal with customers. For more information about what types of solutions you should implement, reach out to Horne & Benik at (603) 499-4400.