If you’ve recently found yourself wondering, “How can I improve my business’s customer service,” this is a positive thought! As a business owner or manager, if you haven’t been thinking about this, it’s time to start. Improving your business’s customer service encourages a positive company culture. It provides your brand with the opportunity to capture and retain high-quality customers that, in return, become brand ambassadors when they have a great experience. This article shares a few simple tips and adjustments that you can make to improve customer service at your organization..
1. Empower Your Employees
In a customer service-based industry, it’s essential that your employees feel confident and proud of the knowledge they have about your brand and products. If an employee does not have the proper training, enabling them to confidently engage with and support the customer in need, they will not perform to their highest ability.
When employees don’t have high confidence, it can result in a negative or non-supportive message conveyed to the customer. Training programs, team-building ventures, and success coaching are affordable ways to give your employees the knowledge and confidence they need to succeed and handle customer service with care. These tactics will also help to improve employee engagement.
2. Allow Your Customers to Get to Know You
Decision-makers have more options than ever before. You are likely competing against other companies that offer the same or similar services/products. Increasingly, customers are buying online.
Creating opportunities for your potential customers to have real-life interaction, or at least one-on-one conversations, with someone in your company can open the door to building trust and brand loyalty. Simply put, people like to feel important when customers get to know employees, conversions and brand awareness increase.
3. Create a Community for Feedback
Although the task of creating an “online community” may fall under the role of the social media or community manager, it is an important asset that impacts the entirety of your company. According to Webbiquity, “84% of CEOs and VPs say they use social media to help make purchasing decisions.” The creation and management of an online community enable you to inform many users, but it also creates a space for honest feedback from prospects and customers.
From time to time, you may get negative feedback or a bad review. With a process in place to appropriately and proactively respond to these comments, however, your business’s customer service will be improved by “humanizing” your brand; you’ll gain the trust of others when they see that their experience and opinion matter. A negative situation, in most cases, can be converted into a positive client experience, making your customer service team look and feel great.
Improving your business’s customer service activity may seem like an overwhelming or wasteful task. We can assure you this is far from true. There are many digital and physical outlets for customers to tarnish your brand, and it’s more important than ever before to have a community management team in place.
