Excellent customer service is crucial for improving client satisfaction and loyalty. And the researches have shown that businesses are 14X more likely to sell a product to an existing loyal customer than a new one. Therefore, it’s fair to say that customer service can make or break a business.
But why is customer service so important?
Deals with Complaints
First of all, customer service helps you deal with complaints. Regardless of how good your product or service you provide is, the odds are that you are going to have some negative feedback from your customers.
Collecting this negative feedback and using it to improve your product or service is of vital importance for keeping your customers satisfied.
Strengthens Brand Reputation
You know what they say about reputation – “it takes years to build it, but just moments to ruin it.”
The way you communicate with customers and reply to complaints, speaks a lot about your brand and reflects your ethics and values. In today’s age, many people rely on online reviews when deciding on a company, and receiving a negative review can destroy your carefully built brand.
To keep your brand’s reputation intact, make sure to provide the best possible customer service to your clients.
Increase Customer Retention
The better the customer service, the more likely it is that people will continue to use your goods and services. Great customer service results in maximum customer retention because it provides the notion of having someone to rely on and builds trust between you and your customers.
Okay, now that we all agree that customer service is very important for running a business, let’s take a look at a few ways to improve your customer service.
1. Know what You are Offering
A key step in providing good customer service is knowing your products and services inside and out. Some clients may encounter a problem while using your products and services and they will need a little bit of guidance on how to solve them.
To help people in a most efficient way, and solve problems that they encounter, it’s important to have customer service that knows every aspect of the product. Having a customer service that’s more confused than the customer that reaches out won’t help at all.
2. Train a Team of People
Providing customer support can be difficult because you have to talk to a lot of people who can be confused, agitated or angry. But customer support team has to treat everyone with respect and can never let their emotions get the most of them.
That’s why you need a well-trained dedicated team of people for the job. You need a group of skilled professionals who know which questions to expect and how to best answer these questions. Also, your team has to be able to answer people’s enquiries in an eloquent and friendly manner. Be rude to a customer once, and you’ll never see or hear from them again.
3. Use the Advantages of Technology
Are you still relying on phone calls to provide customer service? Well if you are, it’s about time to try new stuff and expand your service. Though phones remain an important channel of communication, people are much more likely to reach out to you via email, social media channels or company website.
That’s why it’s important to have a social media manager on your customer service team. Social media management is not just about expanding your reach and engaging your followers. Your social media page can host your first encounter with your customers.
That’s why you have to make sure that your social media management team is equally knowledgeable about customer service as it is about marketing and promotion.
In order to answer the needs of your clients in a timely fashion, make sure to have a person in charge of email requests and complaints. This person should enable notifications and reply to inquiries as soon as they arrive.
Another way to provide customer service online is through chatbots on your site. Chatbots provide the best of both worlds. They combine the anonymity of online communication with the immediacy and the human tone of phone conversations. That’s why chatbots are a favoured form of communication for many users out there.
Let’s Sum Up!
It doesn’t matter if you have the best product or service in the world, the lack of good customer service can completely ruin your company. So make sure to provide your customers with an awesome customer service and enjoy the surge of happy, loyal clients.