Boosting Your Customer Service As Your Business Grows
Effective customer service is vital to businesses. In today’s world, word of mouth is essential to ensure continued growth, and without it, you could fall behind. So, boosting your customer service is important.
When you first launch your business, your customer service can be easy to get right. The queries will be fewer, and you can likely handle the inbound messages while also managing other parts of your business. But as the company develops, customer service can become a much larger part of your operations, requiring a strategy and investment to make sure you get it right.
Here are some tips to help you boost your customer service as your business grows.
Bring in more staff
As your business grows, you’ll need to bring in more employees. While you might be able to manage some of your customer service operations yourself at the beginning, an increase in sales will lead to an increase in queries, requiring dedicated personnel to handle them. By bringing in more employees, you can manage your customer queries much easier, leaving customers satisfied with your efforts.
Improving your team’s customer service skills is essential, and could lead to much higher levels of satisfaction amongst your customers. Regular training can help you bring in the latest practices, while also helping your staff to stay on message.
Find the right management solutions
The key to effective customer service is being able to manage it well. At busy periods, in particular, you’ll appreciate a management system that can help you prioritize, keep records, and handle queries quicker. A ticket system is a valuable piece of software that could easily help you stay on top of your incoming questions. A reliable management solution helps to keep things in order, allowing you to provide your customers with the service they need.
Expand your ways of getting in touch
These days, people want to get in touch with companies in a variety of ways. Many customers will take to social media to complain about a service or ask a question, as it’s a convenient and straightforward way to do so.
By offering multiple ways of getting in touch with your business, customers will have the freedom to choose. Providing a telephone number is also important, as customers can get frustrated dealing with online communications, preferring to have a conversation over the phone instead.
Adding a live chat option to your website can also help you improve your customer services. Customers want fast answers, and if your live chat service can provide them, they’ll be more likely to stay on your website while they get the answers they need.
Put guidance and regulations in place
Keeping the customer happy is the main aim for your customer service, but how you do that can be up for discussion. It’s important to have guidance and regulations in place for your employees so that they can handle any incoming communications effectively.
Guidance should be readily available, and checks should be made to ensure that all employees are following the right procedures. Many companies measure this through mystery shopping exercises, which could be enough to ensure your employees follow the rules.
Ask for feedback
Gathering feedback from your customers can be a simple way of improving your customer service. It’s worth looking at how other businesses collect customer feedback to give you some ideas of best practice and what’s effective. You can ask anything from how your business is doing in general, to more detailed feedback about interactions with employees. This feedback is vital for not only improving your customer service but other elements of your business too.
Many businesses send automated requests for feedback following an interaction, something that your business can begin doing to help guide your ongoing strategy.
Reward your employees to motivate them
Rewarding your employees is a great way to motivate them. Providing incentives can boost performance and is particularly crucial in areas like customer service, which can be target-driven.
There are some fantastic ways to reward employees, including additional vacation days, cash bonuses, and even something as simple as a bottle of wine or champagne. Think of ways you can work to reward your employees to help them provide the best customer service possible.
Monitor your performance
Without monitoring your customer service performance, you won’t know whether or not it’s useful. You should set targets and report against them regularly. You can then be able to identify problem areas or discover the things that are working well. A regular customer service report can help inform your ongoing work, allowing you to make some informed decisions about what to do next.
Simple targets to start off with include the response rate to a query, as well as how many queries are open and close each day successfully.
Encourage user reviews
Reviews are a vital part of eCommerce. Without them, consumers might not know what to buy because they haven’t physically seen or touched an item. Having insights from other people can make that decision easier, which is why online reviews can come in handy. An online review can reveal a lot about a company and could help boost your SEO rankings too. Ask for feedback after a customer has purchased something from you to make sure you get as many reviews as possible.
While you’ll hope that all reviews are positive, you need to be prepared for the negative ones too. You should aim to respond to as many reviews as possible. Responsimg shows that you appreciate the feedback, especially where there are areas you could be improving.
Effective customer service is a must for businesses. It helps to keep customers loyal and spreading the word to their friends and families. By taking steps to boost your customer service, you can get customers to love you, helping your business grow further. Customer service should be easy to get right, but there are many businesses that get it wrong and suffer as a result. Put customer service at the heart of your growing business to help it stay strong in the future.
Alyson Pittman is a contributing writer for WBD and a JR marketing associate for Excite Creative Studios, an Atlanta-based creative agency.
Alyson graduated from Kennesaw State University with a Bachelors of Business Administration and a concentration in Marketing. She was in multiple organizations at KSU where she held leadership positions. As a part of the Delta Phi Epsilon Sorority, Alyson held the Social Coordinator position and planned/promoted large events.
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