5 Ways to Ensure You Get Customer Service Right, Every time

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For businesses, customers are everything. But for customers, you don’t mean a thing. It’s harsh, but it’s the reality. What really matters is how far you are willing to go to do the following:

  • How do you get the customer in?
  • What are you prepared to keep her emotional invested in you?
  • How well will you nurture this relationship?

As businesses, we tend to think in terms of numbers, revenue, profits, and ROI. We forget that it’s people that we are doing business with. People, you very well know, are emotional. To get customer service right, you have to find a way to build that emotional connect.

And how important is a customer really? According to Jawad Khan of Grexit.com, a new customer costs about 6-7 times more than it takes to keep an existing one. The probability to sell to an existing customer is 60% to 70%. Try and sell to a new prospect and your probability falls to about 5-20%.

Here’s how you ensure you get the customer service part right, every time:

Make it a priority, not a business function

Think of customer support as a business function, and you aren’t going to do much but wonder why it’s so expensive to get a customer and as to why they don’t last beyond that innocent first purchase.

If marketing is a priority because it helps you get customers in, customer support should be a priority because it allows you to keep those customers you worked so hard to get.

Put a process in place

You aren’t getting anywhere without a process. Put up a streamlined, well-orchestrated, simple process to follow for customer management. If a customer has an issue, how does she reach out to you? If a customer needs to understand something, is there a knowledge base or an FAQ page? Is there a forum that has user-generated content about your products and services?

Have a process for everything, especially if customer service is important to you. And it should be.

Dedicate resources for customers

Don’t try to do everything yourself. Customer service is a dedication function and it calls for a full-time responsibility. Half-hearted attempts, multi-tasking, and that “getting to it when time is right” approach doesn’t work for customer support.

If you have to be good at this and get it right, you’ll need to dedicate resources to it full-time.

Either that, or it’s nothing.

Hire customer support heroes

You get what you look for. If you went out to seek customer support representatives or agents the traditional way, you’d get people who need jobs and your customers will end up being numbers and nothing more than that. Instead, look for customer support heroes – the kind of people who live and breathe customers.

Find people who are passionate about helping, solving problems, walking the extra mile, and those who have a knack with dealing with people.

How does your customer support look like?

Img Credits: Didricks on Flickr

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