Your customers are everything. Without them, you don’t have a business. It can take a long time for a growing business to connect with its target market and build an offering that appeals to the right people. Building customer loyalty takes dedication, and when you’ve put so much strategy and planning into gaining customers in the first place, you want to retain them.
That’s where good customer service comes in.
Customer service is important for your business because it sets the tone for how you want your business to be known and the number of consumers you want to return. Customer service can often make the difference between a customer leaving or staying if they’ve run into problems with your product or service.
Especially for a new startup business, customer service can be the difference for consumers who know nothing about your business and are acting on trust.
With exceptional customer service, you can increase the likelihood of repeat sales, how much a customer spends with you, how often they spend it, and how well they speak of your business to others.
It can be difficult to pinpoint how to improve your customer service if you already feel as though you are presenting a helpful and high-quality front as a business. Often, good customer service is not so much what you do, but how you do it. As well as being helpful and understanding, you also need to make sure that you’re aware of the many lines of communication customers expect in the modern-day.
Therefore improving customer service is both about your attitude towards customer service and researching current trends and avenues for customer service.
Here are some of the ways you can explore customer service improvement.
Whether you’re a huge business or a small business, personalization is a win for customers because it makes them feel as though you’re dealing directly with them and understanding their personal needs specifically.
When seeking customer service, it’s important for a customer to feel as though their own needs and situation are understood. This can be simple touches such as using their name in any communication, or to personalize service in more detail. Be sure to know about their past dealings with you and any trail of communication they’ve already made. This can help you seem more professional when you already know about them in answering their query, rather than asking them to start from scratch.
There are so many ways to connect with consumers these days that it’s important to utilize them for customer service, too. It’s likely that customers will want online communication for a query rather than having to speak over the phone (though, of course, it’s important to have the phone as a contact option, too).
The more options you provide for customer service, the more positive your customers will react to the service you offer. This means using social media, live chat, messaging, and more. All-in-one systems like JivoChat can make it much easier to connect with your customers across all platforms and be able to answer queries promptly, no matter which platform they are using to communicate.
In order to provide the most tailored and positive service possible, you need to know who you’re tailoring to. Getting to know your customers means you can better understand what they expect of you, your product, and your service. This means you can tailor for that from the very beginning.
Understanding your customers on a deeper level also means that you’ll be more equipped to handle queries or complaints because you will better understand what your customer wants, and how to ensure they get that.
Methods to get to know your customers include:
In marketing your brand and selling your product, you will have built up an established voice, tone, and set of values that reflect your business. It’s important to stick to these when providing customer service. Your customers need to know that they’re still speaking to the same business, so it can be jarring if your customers are used to a highly informal and playful brand voice and then find themselves dealing with a highly formal and serious customer service voice.
You can still be professional when providing customer service even if your brand voice is playful what matters is consistency and being authentic to your brand, even when you’re fixing problems or dealing with complaints.
If a customer has been a little disappointed by your product and service but not enough to make a complaint, it may be that they simply choose not to do business with you again. Without feedback, you’ll never learn why you lost that customer.
To avoid this, you may want to follow up with customers after every inquiry or purchase to get their thoughts. This could be in the form of a quick email survey or inviting them to write a review
If they do report anything negative or which requires improvement, personally thanking them for their feedback and taking steps to avoid it happening again will build a more positive relationship and, if you can make the changes, that customer may easily change their mind about you and choose to return.
Customer service can be greatly improved if you remain humble and open to learning what you’re doing wrong. Good customer service isn’t necessarily about getting it right every time with your product or service, but more about how you can listen and learn from customers, make them feel understood, and improve your business service in any way that you can.
