5 Simple Ways to Improve Your Customer Service Without Breaking the Bank

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Happy customers remain loyal. And when they’re loyal, they continue to buy your products or hire your services. Studies show that just increasing your customer retention rate by 5 percent has the potential of boosting your profit up to a whopping 95 percent. Such a small improvement can be a huge game changer for your business.

One way to keep your customers loyal is to improve customer service. So, you should make it your number one priority to give your customers the best experience possible. If your business slacks in customer service, it can lead to terrible losses. It was revealed for instance, that U.S. companies lose more than $62 billion a year due to poor customer service.

The good news is that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to make improved customer service happen. In fact, there is a lot you can do without spending a dime. Here are some ways you can take your customer service delivery from average to awesome without having to spend so much.

1. Aim for quality interaction

Have you ever made a decision about a business, product or service from the attitude of the sales representative or customer service representative? Even though some customers can be quite a handful sometimes, no one likes to be attended to by a moody or ill-mannered person.

Quality interactions improve your business. Enlighten your staff about the effects of their attitude on the customers. Cultivate the culture of properly responding to the customers. Be empathetic to their plight and polite all the time – even if the customer is in a fit of rage. But most of all, treat your customers the same way you would like to be treated.

2. Get a good grasp of your product and services

There’s nothing that destroys one’s trust in a product or service more than speaking with a sales representative or a customer service personnel who knows little or nothing about the product or service that is being offered.

When those who are in close contact with your customers are not sharp with their knowledge of what your business is offering, you invite the displeasure of your customer. They get impatient because you’re not fast enough. And that leads to a shattered trust in your product or service. To avoid all that, organize a training to improve the performance of your service desk agents.

3. Be sensitive to your customer’s needs

You can’t have a successful business without clients. The more sensitive you are to what your clients need and the more effort you put in to make it available, the more they will be pleased with your service. They’ll know you’re responsive to their needs and that you actually care.

It’s not just about developing your product or services based on the feedback you get from your clients. You also need the feedback to improve their experience with your offering.

Do everything you need to do to be available to your customers. For example, you can set up live chat so that they can always be in contact if they have any inquiries.

4. Create valuable resources

There are millions of people searching for solutions to different problems. Whether it is how to watch the world cup from anywhere in the world, how to use machine learning, or how to knot a tie, they need solutions. Some of these problems can be solved directly by your business, but for some, the little extra information you give could be what will endear your customer to you.

Blog posts, tutorials, infographics, whitepapers, guides and videos make great resource materials your customer can use to deepen their experience with your products and services. This will get them to keep coming back.

5. Get the whole team involved

Excellent customer service delivery is usually heaped on the shoulders of the customer service department. They are the ones in the line of fire of customer complaints and inquiries.

But great customer service shouldn’t just start and end with them. The whole team has to be involved.
Get the customer service team involved in strategy meetings. This will make sure that they contribute their suggestions and observations from the customers they meet on a daily basis. That way any development to the product or services will be made with the exact needs of the customers in mind.

The customer service department may not be conversant with technicalities behind the product or service. This means they will need to liaise with the departments who have the expertise to answer technical questions.

When the whole team is involved in doing their part to enhance their customer service delivery then the business will end up with very happy customers.

Toby Nwazor
Toby Nwazor is a business consultant with more than nine years hands-on experience in the fields of content marketing, sales, customer service, and business development. He is a class 2018 MBA graduate of ESUT Business School.

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