Photo by Zach, CC BY-SA 2.0
When it comes to customer service, this is probably one of the most important parts of your business. Without your customers coming back for more and more of your product, there is no way that you’re going to be successful. That’s why a high-quality customer service operation is crucial to the future of your company. Imagine what would happen if your customers had no way of finding answers to their questions. Or if they couldn’t get a refund for a defunct product. These are all problems that would arise if you didn’t have a strong customer service performance in your company. Keep reading down below to learn some of the top strategies you can implement in your company to improve the service you provide to customers.
1. Make Customer Service a Company-Wide Value
When it comes to customer service, you probably only think about those people in your company who answer the phones when people ring in with inquiries. However, this is the completely wrong way of thinking about customer service. If you want to have a successful customer service performance, then you should make customer service a value that every single customer keeps in mind, no matter if they’re in direct contact with customers or not. Think of ways that you can make customer service into a value that’s honored throughout your company. You can do this by implementing a customer service regimen into your employee training program. Or you can have regular customer service performance updates from each employee, where they tell you how they are improving the experience of customers.
No matter how you implement this, make sure that everyone in your company knows why customer service is so important. Without providing excellent services to your customers, they will not come back for more and you will constantly have to hunt down new customers.
2. Make Sure the Messaging Is Consistent Across the Organization
An important step to improving your customer service performance is ensuring that messaging is consistent across your company. Let’s take a look at an example. If one person in your company tells a customer that a product does one thing, but another employee tells that same customer that there’s no way the product does that, then that is inconsistent messaging. Every employee should know exactly what your product or service delivers and every detail along with that. If they don’t know the answer to a customer’s question, then your employees should understand it’s OK to say ‘I don’t know’ and come back with the answer when they’ve found it.
When you have inconsistent messaging in your company, this is only going to confuse those customers who could become return customers if you treated them correctly.
3. Remove Anonymity from Your Team
One of the worst things you can do for your customer service performance is making your employees anonymous to customers. Many customer service teams are filled with ‘Jims’ and ‘Susans’ who are completely anonymous to the customers. This immediately creates a wall between the customer and your employee, and your business will have to bear the cost of bad customer service. When employees speak with customers on a personal basis, then that relationship is going to be built properly. They are going to feel much more comfortable with one another and the customer will feel much happier to be speaking to an actual person.
Plus, when your employees are not anonymous, this makes holding them accountable much easier. If something goes wrong with a customer, he or she will be able to point out with employee had tried to help him or her. You will then be able to speak with that employee directly to figure out what happened and what action needs to be taken. If they were anonymous, you wouldn’t have this kind of control over the actions of your employees.
4. Always Be Available from Every Place
Next up, we need to talk a little bit availability. Start by taking into account the methods that customers have to find you and speak with your employees. If that number is only one or two, then that’s a problem to be addressed. When your customers can only access your company over the phone or by email, then that’s leaving out a ton of people who would like to use another method of communication. You should make sure your company is available most hours of the day and from every place you can think of. This means Facebook, Instagram, email, over phone, over text, etc. It’s been shown in numerous studies that consumers want to work with companies that are easily reachable if and when something goes wrong with the product or when they have a question. If you do this and implement plenty of messaging services, your customers are going to feel much more comfortable reaching out when they have a problem that you can fix. Otherwise, they may never reach out to ask that question and may just keep being unhappy with your service.
5. Make Your Knowledge Accessible to Customers
And lastly, we’ll talk a bit about the knowledge that you have. Nowadays, customers don’t just want a product or service from a company. They don’t just want to buy what they need and get out of the store. Consumers are desiring more and more the ability to learn more about the products they are getting and the industry they come from. For example, a lot of consumers now want the companies that have company blogs. This is where you will put information regarding your product, industry trends, and other types of posts. When customers see that this knowledge of yours is easily accessible, they are much more likely to buy into what you have to offer. This makes you a source of credibility for them and they are much more likely to trust you.
And there you have it! When thinking about how to make customer service central to your organization and improve performance across the board, these are the strategies you need to make that happen.
Quite an informative article Himanshu!
You, very rightly, said that being present everywhere and always helps the customers to trust the brands and remain loyal towards it. Since the inception of social media platforms, communication has become much more widespread. Since the whole consumer world is out there actively on social media, every customer would really like their favourite brands/ companies to be out, either engaging its customers or solving customer queries.