Success in business depends on numerous things. Nowadays, an organization has to be socially responsible, assure the best quality of products and services, provide proper incentives and benefits for its employees and, of course, use a profitable customer service strategy. As it turns out, customer service has a lot of challenges an organization must distinguish and deal with to achieve the best results in the market. These customer service tips will help to improve a customer service system (CSS) and a company’s public image and increase the turnover subsequently. A business owner who wants to build a trustful relationship with the clientele must learn by heart the nine customer service tips mentioned in this article.
Ease of Use
A company’s website should be intuitively comprehensible, always available, and have a pleasant design. These aspects are crucial to gain customers’ trust and assure that they get a full use of possibilities that a site can offer. It is better to provide all web pages without auto login and verify whether everything functions flawlessly before making it available to the customers.
Timeliness
Timeliness is a significant issue when it comes to customer service. A product or a service should always be delivered on time. Even the smallest failure can turn into a catastrophe. If a product or a service is operated with late, a customer would reconsider the attitude towards a company and ask himself/herself whether it is reasonable and secure to trust it for the second time.
Continuous Education
The world is constantly changing. This is also true for businesses. New tendencies replace the old ones, growing competition requires new approaches to the company’s mission and organization of work. Education is an important tool in reaching perfection. A company should consider it not as an additional expenditure but as a reasonable investment in the future.
Employees Who Like People
Of course, it is possible to motivate employees by giving them material incentives. However, it will not assure flawless functioning of a company’s department which deals directly with the clients. Customer-facing employees must have a range of individual traits including openness and agreeableness. Also, they should have proficient communication skills. So, human resources managers have to pay attention to these factors while interviewing job applicants.
- Keeping an eye on competitors.
- Using a proper language.
- Individualized approach.
- Unified customer service team.
- Cooperation with the customers.
It is always beneficial to check the achievements of main competitors in the market. Maybe, they provide better service or make products of higher quality. In these cases, a company has to analyze competitors’ activity, find main differences and try to abolish them to achieve the same results. Moreover, it is necessary to analyze the experience of well-known companies which can represent another industry but still define customers’ expectations for quality service. For example, these companies are Starbucks, McDonald’s, Apple.
It is not sufficient just to tell the right things to the clients. A company has to introduce these things properly. Grammar, spelling, registers, style – everything has to be taken into account. A customer will not cooperate with a company which has a large number of grammar mistakes on its website because he or she will simply lose the trust.
Customers do not like to be treated in a generalized sense. To the contrary, they like to feel that they are important to the company, that the staff cares about their experiences and tries to adjust its services to meet their requirements. So, there should be no standard procedure for every client, no boring phrases nor artificial politeness, only personalized attitude and true emotions.
Customer service members should be actually a team. They must not be single players who try to overwork to get more bonuses than their colleagues. Employees who work directly with the clients must be ready to cooperate, help, and ask for help when it is needed. So, it is crucial to create a special atmosphere in the department which would enhance workplace productivity.
As practice shows, customers do not like to ask multiple questions to the support department employees. They are more inclined to find all necessary information on the site and solve the problems by themselves. It would be better to give customers this chance and decrease the amount of work the employees must carry out. So, it is necessary to provide detailed information about all offers and services of a company as well as the tools enabling customers to get what they want directly.
These nine customer service tips will be extremely useful for any company to improve customer relationship. However, the list is not exhaustive because many other issues can arise during the work. These tips provide only general tools to determine a company’s policy regarding the customer service. Anyway, reasonable customer service strategy is one of the decisive points which brings success.
References
Gibson, P. (2013). The World of Customer Service. Cengage Learning.
Knapp, D. (2014). A Guide to Customer Service Skills for the Service Desk Professional. Cengage Learning.
Rapinen, T. (2003). Information Technology-enabled Global Customer Service. Idea Group Inc (IGI).
Tschohl, J. (2011). Achieving Excellence Through Customer Service. AudioInk.
Zeithaml, V. A., & Bitner, M. J. (2003). Services Marketing: Integrating Customer Focus Across the Firm. McGraw-Hill/Irwin.