Customer service is more than just answering the phone and solving problems. It’s about improving your relationships with customers to ensure they continue to choose your service over your competitors and recommend your business to other people. Customer service is the cornerstone of your business, and it’s something that you and your support team should constantly be improving.
What is good customer service?
Good customer service is finding a solution to a customer’s problem as quickly and successfully as possible. It’s crucial for any business because it attracts new customers and helps your business stand out in the industry. When you have a reputation for good customer service, there’s a better chance people will choose your service over your competitors.
How to improve customer service
There are several ways to improve customer service such as using key performance indicators to track customer service performance metrics, and optimize your performance and customer satisfaction. We’ve highlighted the simplest, most effective ways to help you get started. By
Know your customers
When you understand your customers’ needs and expectations, you can provide a service that keeps them happy. You can either do this in-house, or you can look at hiring a virtual assistant for customer service, which can free up your team to ensure the business is functioning as it should for the customers. Customer needs constantly change, so you must conduct ongoing research to understand their needs better and guarantee long-term customer satisfaction. If you know what they want, you can ensure your service always meets their expectations. If your service doesn’t meet their expectations, they’ll be unhappy and may sign up for a competitor’s services.
Ask for feedback
Customer feedback can help you understand your customers’ needs better, and you can use this information to improve your customer service. While many businesses focus on the positive feedback customers share, you shouldn’t shy away from constructive criticism. Negative customer experiences allow you to find out what your clients don’t like about your service so you can find new ways to meet their expectations. Invite your customers to complete surveys, which you can share on your website or via email. Surveys show customers your dedication to improving the quality of your service. You can also use customer review sites to collect feedback. Find out which ones your competitors are using, or which ones are popular in your industry and get listed.
Boost your team’s customer service skills
Improving your support team’s customer service skills will give them the confidence to manage customer complaints effectively. You can boost their customer service skills with training. Whether you choose online or in-person workshops, the training should teach your employees how to listen to customers, communicate with them, solve problems quickly and efficiently, and be empathetic. You should also train your support team to personalise customer service. It’s easier to find out your customers expectations and why they’re unhappy when you engage with them rather than follow a script.
Make it easy for customers to complain
Customers will become frustrated if they can’t get in touch with you to share their experiences, so make sure they know how to contact you. Share links to your social media platforms on your website and make it easy for them to find your contact information online. It’s essential to respond quickly to all customer complaints on all your platforms. If you have multiple platforms for communication, but your team isn’t active on all of them, your customers will become frustrated. It can also negatively affect your reputation, as potential customers will see that you don’t respond to bad reviews or complaints. Ensure your support team knows the process for responding to customer complaints and that they respond to everyone.
Sign up for Help Desk Software
Help Desk Software is designed to help businesses create, manage and track support tickets. With the right system, you can give your team the necessary tools to deal with customer concerns efficiently. Your support team can prioritise tickets with categories, ensuring that urgent tasks are completed first. They can then collect the information they need from customers with questionnaires, which are quick to complete, helping your team find a solution as quickly as possible. With cloud-based Help Desk Software, your team can store solutions to common problems on the system and share them immediately with customers, helping them resolve minor issues quickly to close more tickets.