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How To Improve Your Customer Service As An Entrepreneur

Introduction

The difference between an average company and a good company in any field is excellent customer service. Consequently, most companies strive to leverage customer service in other to increase repeat customers. An organization, however, requires a holistic and customer-centric approach to improve customer service.

Good customer service is the recipe for business success. Customers, therefore, are the most vital asset any company can have. No company can exist in business without them.

As a result, the practice of customer service should be present in the overall company environment. Satisfied customers are repeated customers. Also, satisfied customers will recommend you to friends and associates.

Excellent customer service is not always adhering to “the customer is always right.” However, always enlighten yourself on ways of improving your customer service teams to increase the satisfaction of customers. And even if your customer service is good, you should still create new ways to make your customers happy.

Thankfully, the following are some of the many proven ways to go about this:

Table of contents

What is Customer Service?

This refers to the intensity to which a product meets or exceeds the customer’s expectations. It is also how you deliver your product or service to your customers. Though this term is self-explanatory, many people still struggle to understand it.

In short, customer service is the help and advice your company provides to clients before, during, and after purchases. This can be in the form of an e-mail, a phone call, face to face interaction, or a self-service system. All these have an impact on customer satisfaction. 

Provide clients with timely attention, useful advice from polite representatives, and spend the least time possible on solving their issues. Controlling these synergies on a high level is essential if you concentrate on excellent customer relations.

Types of Customer Service

As a conscious business owner, it is vital to understand your customers and their demands. A brand’s reliability is measured by the quality of customer service it renders. Therefore, with robust customer survey software, you can conduct regular customer service surveys with your targeted customers.

Such software will help your group to carry out thorough analysis using high-level analytics. This will help your company become a more customer-oriented organization. Various clients require different types of support from an organization.

The following are 5 types of customer services to keep in mind:

Assisting Potential Customers

Potential customers are prospects who have shown interest in the services or products of a company. This could be in the form of the following;

  1.  Either providing their contact information via the company website.
  2. Contacting the sales support team through online chat.
  3. Conducting meetings offline via phone or face-to-face.

These potential customers, however, form the initial layer of your sales funnel and will need continuous help to turn them into buyers.

Therefore, make sure these prospects have clarity on what to anticipate from products or services. You can do this by sharing product page links for the products they are interested in, contently. A communication team should always be available to guide them. 

Guidance to Impulsive Customers

With this kind of customers, it is easy to convince them to make a purchase. Besides, the procedure involved in purchasing products should be clearly defined, easy, and quick. Therefore, you must have the least number of clicks and precise information to purchase.

These customers will purchase in a moment if they have absolute clarity on what they want. Also, a solution should be given shortly, precisely when impulsive customers are stuck. There is a higher chance that these customers might quit the website session if answers are too long,

Support the Patriot

These customers will make repeated purchases from the same organization. They are also a trustworthy source of word of mouth to other prospects. They are a good source of recommendation to the general public. Hence, engage them regularly in talks to understand their view of your products or services.

The customer service team also has the role of ensuring customer retention by actively engaging with clients. However, you can create a case study about their experience and regulate it via social media or website. Take note of the steps followed to turn these customers into loyal buyers. Repeat the steps on other prospects.

Onboarding new clients

There are instances where customers have already purchased a product and need help to figure out how it functions. It is, however, the duty of the customer service team to provide every additional information to them. Therefore, providing immediate support to these customers will gradually convert them into loyal buyers.

This tends to develop closer bonds with your clientele.

Help customers looking for discounts

Customers of this nature will never purchase at the quoted price of products and services. They are always looking for something extra in a product or service at any given price. Once they previously purchased at discounted rates, they will not buy the same products if they cannot utilize discounts.

However, your team has to add value to products to get these customers to make a purchase. Assist them with coupon codes or any other privilege. This can retain them to stay with your organization for a longer tenure.

Importance of Customer Service

The under-listed are some reasons why good customer service is crucial for any business:

  1. Good customer service helps to retain customers, and repeated clients make larger purchases compared to new ones.
  2. A company’s brand image and values are showcased via direct communication.
  3. Customers share positive experiences with friends and family, referring new customers to your company.
  4. Satisfied clients will pay more for a better experience.
  5. Good customer service makes customers feel valued, giving you a competitive advantage over other companies.
  6. It breeds loyalists who continue to patronize your business.
  7. Also, it creates brand evangelists who can help you acquire more customers through word-of-mouth marketing.
  8. It proves to your clients that you care for them even after they have parted.

Improving customer service

Businesses face several common problems related to customer service. They include long waiting times, poor agents’ knowledge, lack of empathy, too much automation, and so on. However, the under listed are some tips that can help you to provide excellent service to your customers;

Good customer service agents are good listeners

Identify the client’s needs by asking questions and pay attention to what the client is saying. Pay attention to their body language, words, tone of voice, and how they feel. Therefore, do not jump to conclusions, thinking you intuitively know what the customer wants. These are important to your customer;

  1. Effective listening
  2. Undivided attention

There is a great danger of preoccupation, particularly on the showroom floor. Here, you could be looking around to see whom else you could be selling to.

A good customer service team should be professional

An unskilled team can destroy your reputation. The team can also fail to apply other strategies. Thus, it is important to see to it that they will do their best to attend to clients’ needs. Therefore, employing the right customer service team is an essential step for any business.

Consider the following requirements when hiring customer service agents:

  1. Patience and empathy. This will enable them to handle various requests on the same high level.
  2. Adaptability. You should be able to sense a client’s mood and use the appropriate approach.
  3. Clear communication.  Use simple language so that customers can understand your messages.
  4. Work ethics. You should treat every client on equal terms.
  5. Knowledge.  For a reliable response, your employees should be well informed of your product details.

Therefore, you should investigate more about the people you are hiring to be sure they are professionals.

Involve customers when dealing with customer service

Usually, customer service can be improved by finding new ways to interact with your clients. It can also be achieved by making existing interactions more personal. Today’s technology makes it possible to add a personal touch to your client relationships.

You can, however, send holiday and birthday messages, using their names and personal data in communications. You can also log into their interaction history for agents to access them on the phone.

Good customer service requires trained front-line staff

The determinant factor of success of your customer service operation rest with your front-line workers. They are the face of your business as they deal personally with clients. However, if they are well trained, it will reflect on how your customers perceive your company’s products and services.

Therefore, make sure these employees are skilled in conflict resolution and encourage them to strive to exceed your customer’s expectations. They should also have winning personality traits that your business’s patrons are unlikely to forget.

Good customer service requires customer attention

Good entrepreneurs will recognize the needs of their customers and respond to them. Therefore, you should give your clients quality service. This will give your company a good word-of-mouth advertisement.

Also, take note of the vital information that clients give you through some notes or tags. Likewise, information exchanged over the phone could be recorded for ease of reference. It is, however, crucial for voice conversations with the customer when growing your brand loyalty and business opportunities.

Good customer service offers proactive services

Anticipate the consumer journey and try to predict the problems that can occur. Act proactively and do away with preventable issues. Do not wait until customers face problems that they cannot solve.

You can send them loyalty offers, payment reminders, and free trials.

However, such interactions should be personalized, timely, and informative for your clients. In this case, you exceed customer expectations, reduce inbound calls, and improve the efficiency of your team.

Good customer service requires a regular review of your call center scripts

grayscale photo of a woman making a call with headphones
Make scripts flexible as though agents were talking to a friend

Call center scripts are important in ensuring a consistent customer experience within a call center handling large volumes of interactions.

Therefore, if clients complain that their experience is not up to their expectations, consider reviewing your script.  If that happens, your scripts may be inflexible or executed in a way that the customer knows that a script is being read. Think of possible ways to make the script more natural, personalized, and flexible.

Increase your team

How to Improve Customer Service, people doing office work, each member to a desk
Your employees should reach your customers any where in any language so review your team size

Localized customer care makes it possible to employ people who are responsible for customers anywhere. Therefore, you should provide customer care twenty-four hours and also in the native tongue. With localized customer care, it is easy to train dedicated teams for a specific location.

You should, however, hire agents that you can trust.

Reach out using social media

How to Improve Customer Service, some social media networks displayed on a phone screen
Make easier for your customers to reach through the social media

Social media is a platform that your clients can easily reach you. However, you need to get the balance right so that you do not get spammed. You may also find yourself selling something to the same person every 5 minutes. Also, you have to make yourself approachable if you want to connect well with your customers.

Good customer service requires you to stick to your principles

Feed your agents with the ideology that customer service is the number one priority for the business. Therefore, do not let common mistakes go uncorrected. The sooner they are corrected, the less they will affect the business’s reputation.

However, incentives and rewards are a great motivator for your team that you should not forget.

Good customer service involves call recording service

These recordings give valuable insights into how your employees communicate with your customers. Also, you will see which employees are good and those that need to be re-trained. It helps you to point out mistakes when you are talking to an employee.

However, it is used as an onboarding and training material for new team members. This is because they can listen to real-life examples of what is expected of them. Call recording also gives you a chance to examine the most frequent problems your customers face.

With this, you can formulate valuable input about which segments of your product or service need improvement. It also gives you an insight into some future changes you should make to what you already have.

Good customer service requires that you gather customer feedback

Do not ignore clients’ suggestions, reviews, and complaints. They are sources of valuable insights on how to improve customer service. It may be in the form of expanding your FAQ section, some information on your website, instruction for your call center agents, and so on.

Though it may seem time-consuming, it may be your secret to improving customer satisfaction.

However, it shows that you care about your clients and put a value on your communication.

Good customer service requires that you create a customer-centered brand

Some entrepreneurs have the notion that customer-centered culture is not an internal asset of the business. They, however, have to rethink it. Therefore, as a conscious entrepreneur, integrate the core values of your unique and compelling culture into your marketing campaigns.

By communicating your commitment to service through your brand, you can improve your customer interactions. The client will be more willing to reach out and take advantage of your service channels to get positive resolutions to issues.

Good customer service involves tracking customer experience metrics

With unreliable data or subjective impressions, it is difficult to improve quality. Therefore, track your call center’s performance in other to establish several key metrics that are easily measured.

Also, track customer experience with a hosted call center solution that collects and analyzes customer experience data. The result will be greater customer and agent insights, which improve customer service.

Good customer service involves knowing what your customers want

Customer service involves providing customers what they want. However, businesses have to find out what their customers want in other to provide it. Asking them is the easiest way to get this information from customers.

You should, therefore, assign customer service personnel to engage customers in short conversations about your services. You can also send out questionnaires to customers seeking crucial feedback.

Focus customer service on brand image for good customer service

Poor customer service damages your brand and causes clients to choose your competitors. Therefore, make sure that your agents understand the importance of their work to the company’s long-term success.

Sometimes, you need to convince agents to focus on customer service.

Hence, use measurable metrics to demonstrate the connection between brand perceptions and customer experience.

For good customer service, be friendly

How to Improve Customer Service, a woman smiling at a customer after service
A simple smile is friendly enough to win you repeat customers

Sounding like a machine when engaging with customers is a big turn off. A customer can easily get frustrated if they are talking to someone who cannot understand their situation. Therefore, try as much as possible to make them feel as they are having a conversation with a friend.

You can be kind, try to understand them, and put yourself in their position to provide the best solution. While on the telephone, make sure you are as engaging and willing to go the extra mile.

Take advantage of negative feedback for good customer service

Nobody wants to hear negative comments about themselves or their business.  However, embrace it and take it as a stepping stone to transform your customer’s experience.  There is no perfect business setup with perfect customers.

Therefore, any kind of feedback will help your company to learn and grow. Once you address a bad experience, it shows customers that each individual is a valued customer. This means that increasing engagement and value can increase customer loyalty.

Use training to reinforce customer service culture

Replacing senior employees with new ones can cause a degenerate in the service culture. However, orientation and on the job training are essential tools for you to maintain the core values of your service culture. They are also tools that can ensure that customer service remains a core value of your culture.

Involve support team members for good customer service

Team members from HR, Finance, Quality, and Procurement should be involved in any initiative that includes your frontline-customer teams. This is because they impact your customer service but are often overlooked and can feel undervalued by the organization.

Hence find ways to increase the team’s understanding between each of these support departments with the customer. Improve customer service by bringing them together.

Set measurable customer service goals for good customer service

How to Improve Customer Service, a man lecturing a woman with a plan on a dry erase board
Having a goal gives you a purpose for which you should fulfill

Deciding the goals is the first step to take when considering a customer service quality improvement plan. Therefore, the goals should be measurable so that it is clear to everyone.

You can, however, use matrices to track progress and note the patterns you might have missed. Some intermittent problems will be identified and solved by analyzing metrics.

For good customer service, ask for feedback, and learn from the results

Provide customers with a platform to voice their views. They will feel involved that you want to hear their opinions and improve their future shopping experience. Alert customers that survey or feedback forms are available and the reward they will get for completing it.

Many clients may be keen to voice their experience but if you do not prompt them, they will not talk.

For good customer service, always use positive language

Cheering people up with business while using your service is not as easy as it may seem. Customers tend to be stressed out. Therefore, you have to deliver a stress-free experience.

However, a good tactic to focus on is using positive language and approach while dealing with customers. Having them feel comfortable talking to an agent is important. Hence, keep them interested, and you will be giving them a reason to come back.

Improve employee engagement and motivation

Every team member has an impact on the customer experience with your brand. This is because improving customer service goes beyond the call center. Keeping employees motivated and engaged can improve your customer experience.

Therefore, a holistic approach to improving customer service within your organization is important for a group. Recognize your customers as the driving force that keeps your customers coming back. Make sure every member of your team feels important and understands how they fit into the mission.

Hence, this would usually start during your onboarding process. Reward them for the good work they do to further your mission. Ideally, anything that gets rewarded will be repeated.

For good customer service, encourage accountability

Accountability is an important part of any organization’s approach to enhancing customer service. Workers will expect management to fix problems without their involvement if accountability is absent in a setup. Hence, encourage accountability by engaging your front-line teams in goals that will improve their process. Finally, assign each department a goal and break it into smaller segments for each team.

For good customer service, master closing a conversation

The conclusion of interaction makes every single interaction better. It should be inspiring for further co-operation. Therefore, an issue unresolved creates unnecessary problems.

Always ask if there is anything else you can help them with while they are still on the line. These little things can help you to understand your customers better. Finally, let your clients feel good about themselves and your company.

Some common customer service mistakes

Get familiar with these common mistakes:

  1. Only focusing on feedbacks and ignoring the negative ones because they legitimize your operations. 
  2. Being defensive against a customer and thinking that you do not need them.

Conclusion

The result of good customer service is satisfied clients who are more loyal, can bring you more income, and also promote your brand. Becoming a little bit better gives you an advantage that can be quickly lost as competitors copy your lead. However, continually improving your customer experience creates a gap between you and your competitors that will be difficult for them to overcome.

Finally, customer service cannot be improved by just a single meeting or policy change. It is an ongoing project. Therefore, keep following the tips above and always communicate with customers and employees as often as possible to find ways to improve.

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