customer service is the key element in providing a competitive edge to a particular business. If you are successful in providing a stellar customer experience, this will definitely earn you more sales, customers and increased sales volume.
What is the most practical step an entrepreneur can take to beat the market competition? Is this about how good a particular business is at marketing or advertising? To some extent, these factors might be responsible because for a customer an ad or a marketing campaign might be an attraction to first time visit an e-store or purchase from a particular seller but either that particular client will revisit or repurchase from the same vendors, depends largely on the customer experience, the client receives.
Therefore, customer service is the basic element responsible for bringing long-term results for a business. To get a competitive advantage, an entrepreneur has to focus on improving its customer experience as it serves as a differentiating factor any kind of business.
Here are some basic customer service practices which can help you fight the tough market competition in an ideal way.
Make it Easy for Customers to reach out to Your CSRs
To provide an easy, fast and reliable point of connectivity is the foremost step which an entrepreneur needs to take because if a customer does not find where to reach out to your CSRs from, the purchase process stops in the middle. Whether it is email, telephone or live support chat, you need to make every support channel fully ready.
Minimize the Wait time to the Maximum
What annoys customers the most while making an online purchase? Waiting long in the queues while listening to the elevating music on a phone is perhaps the most teasing thing, especially when a customer has come to your e-store to make an immediate purchase. Therefore, either it is your telephonic support, email or live customer support, you need to make each channel quick enough to minimize the wait time to the maximum so that a customer does not get any chance to switch to your competitors.
Listen Carefully
The next important step is to listen to your customers’ carefully because you cannot provide them assistance unless you understand completely what they are saying. During a telephonic conversation, understanding the exact sound or accent becomes difficult; however, during live chat conversation, there come minimum errors because you can clearly see what a customer writes.
Provide Immediate Solutions
To continue a sales process you need to provide on-the-spot responses to your potential clients. For instance, if a customer sends you a message through live chat, your CSRs should provide quick responses so that the sales process does not stop in the middle.
Customer Complaints
This is an obvious fact that every business receives complaints but if the ratio goes beyond a certain limit, then starts the downfall stage. Therefore, make sure you have established a proper system to deal with customers’ complaints. Use email, social media and live chat software to provide immediate solutions depending upon the seriousness of a complaint.
After Sales Support
For some entrepreneurs, it may not be as important but those, who are really concerned about creating a stellar customer experience on their websites, it really matters. After-sales support is what can sometimes convince a particular client to revisit a particular store. Usually, the support after sales is provided through email in which a CSR not only asks about the experience the customer had on your e-store but also sends the detail of the whole shopping process. For instance, by using live chat support, you can send a chat history to a particular client and thus the recalling compels a buyer to revisit a store in future.