Customer service is one of the most important things in business. If you don’t have customers then you don’t have a business. This is one of the reasons that treating your customers well can make or break your business. A lot of people will buy from businesses on word-of-mouth recommendations and read online reviews so you want to make sure the majority of those reviews are glowing. There are a few ways you can make sure your customer service is perfect or as close to perfect as you can get.
While customer service is important, the customer is not always right. While making sure customer service is high quality there are sometimes unreasonable and just plain rude customers and in these cases, you also want to make sure you are protecting your employees and staff. You don’t want them to feel like the customers matter but they do not.
Teach It, Train It, Live It In Your Business
A key to good customer service is to make sure it is instilled in your employees from the outset and throughout their careers with you. When onboarding staff you can start by setting up a presentation about customer service, why it is important and how you practise it daily. Throughout the presentation, you can do little quizzes to see how people are scoring in how effective they are with customer service and then you can work on any bits they fall short on. Before you have people go out into the job you can also go through role-play scenarios and mark them on them where they have to pass a mark to be able to go live with customers. You can then do an annual refresher training so everyone is always up to date and vigilant with their customer service.
One of the ways you can make sure you are taking on people who are great at customer service is by an AI recruitment agency. This way you can make sure you are hiring people who are already experienced in the customer service role and can use their skills to be a good addition to your company.
Make Sure It Is Good In All Channels Of Communication
Most businesses these days have multiple ways they can be in contact with their customers or potential customers. You need to be vigilant and have processes and policies for how customers are conversed with in all methods. The main route may be through the phone but people may also contact your business through face-to-face, emails, website enquiries or social media. You can set up mini-training and guidelines on how to reply to your customers through every channel that they contact you through.
Get Feedback And Find Feedback From Your Customers
A great way to see how your business is going and also see how your employees are doing is to get feedback. There are a few ways you can get feedback. If you take a lot of phone calls for your customer service queries you can get an automatic system which gets feedback after the call. You can then get the feedback instantly and see how that customer was dealt with. They normally rate their experience out of 10 as well as how helpful the customer service agent is, if they resolved the query and if they would use your business again. It gives you real time insight into it and if anything is flagged up you can deal with it straight away.
You can also incentivise customers to take a customer service feedback survey by making it a competition, by sharing their thoughts about their experience with your company they can go into a draw to win something. You can put these on the bottom of your receipts or on your website so people can see them straight away.
Another way to see feedback about your business is by looking at social media. It may not be sent straight to you but you can track businesses names and hashtags and see if anything is said about your business. Unfortunately, a lot of people post negative stuff online and rarely positive stuff so if you do see stuff it may be people moaning and complaining. You can then reply to these people asking them to email you the issues, so you can then address their concerns and you can hopefully win them back as a customer or at least right and wrongs that happened.
By focusing on customer service you can help your business grow and succeed.
