Recent events have highlighted the benefits of providing better customer service and amplified the need surrounding it. In the early days of the pandemic, businesses suffered significant operational disruptions as they figured out how to navigate changing public health mandates and consumer demands.
What kept many customers returning to buy was their experience, as well as their engagement with the company’s employees. Customers recognize and reward excellent customer service, such as when employees:
- Recognize and offer special greetings to repeat customers
- Go the extra mile to locate a rare item
- Cheer up a customer who looked down
- Handle an over-the-phone return with grace
- Offer a smile and friendly small talk at check-out
Excellent customer service is more important than ever before, given:
- Good customer service inspires customer loyalty
- It’s less expensive to retain loyal customers than to acquire new ones
- Customers are often willing to pay a premium for excellent customer service
- Satisfied customers will refer others to your business, helping your company grow
- Solid customer service can help convert consumers to customers as well as support upselling
- A well-executed customer service program can help you discover invaluable product and marketing insights
- Excellent customer service can increase a customer’s lifetime value
Regardless of whether your customer interactions are socially distanced or virtual, what will keep your customers coming back is how well they are treated when engaging with your business. Here are five tips to ensure your company is offering superior customer service:
1. Respond Quickly To Customer Service Inquiries
Train your staff to respond quickly to customer service inquiries. Even if the resolution to their issue may take some time, the initial outreach should be rapid and sympathetic. Focus on gathering all the information necessary to solve the problem. When a problem does take some time to resolve, regular communication with the customer about progress towards the resolution is essential.
Ensure that all of your public-facing employees, not just your customer service staff, are cross-trained in providing effective customer service. It’s not the customer’s job to navigate your organizational chart to handle a return or get a question answered. And prepare all your staff to handle inquiries with patience, grace, and a determination to solve problems.
2. Be Helpful Without Being Prompted
A company that anticipates its customer’s needs and meets them before being solicited will retain customers and gain new ones through word-of-mouth. Imagine if your local office supply store had your order assembled for you when you walk in the door. Or, if the owner of your favorite business gave you a call when they receive goods they know match your needs. Customers prefer to do business with companies that know them, value them, and make things easy for them. So, orient your staff and operations to do all three for your customers.
Even something as simple as a handwritten note or a small gift to a frequent customer is a gesture that isn’t soon forgotten. And as companies compete in an era of economic uncertainty, it’s those gestures that can keep a business afloat or thriving.
3. Offer Round-The-Clock Support
Whether your business is open 24/7 or not, you want to offer customer service 24/7. Why? Because your customers are working all of the time. While your brick-and-mortar store may close at 7, a customer may try to buy an item off your website at 3 am or fill out a customer service form. And if they encounter a problem that can’t be easily solved, they may drift onto a competitor’s site to make the purchase.
You don’t necessarily need to have a full-time staff complement working round-the-clock on customer service. You can:
- Outsource after-hours call service to a call center in a different timezone
- Make use of digital tools, such as AI-powered chatbots, to help handle fundamental service inquiries
- Use Interactive Voice Response systems to handle routine inquiries
- Create a robust online knowledge base that helps customers find answers to the questions they seek
- Build an online community forum, where customer service questions can be crowdsourced
- Have a skeleton crew of customer service staff on call after hours for unique and challenging customer issues
However, you establish your after-hours support, offering round-the-clock service can keep customers coming back to you time and again.
4. Offer More Self-Service Options
Giving customers options to manage all aspects of their orders, from top-to-bottom, cannot only help you improve your efficiency by mitigating the risk of fulfillment and shipping mistakes. It can also leave customers feeling more empowered and engaged with your brand. Customers will prefer the firm that gives them multiple product customization and shipping options rather than those that lack flexibility. Businesses can combine online customization tools and AI-powered logistics and fulfillment platforms to great effect to give customers the choices they covet.
5. Keep Your Word, No Matter What
It’s great to overdeliver, but under-delivering has severe consequences. In the social media era, a company that breaks its word to one can lose the trust of many. Make sure that you only make commitments you can keep and move mountains to make sure you do. Keeping to your commitments is central to customer trust, and once you break your word, even once, you can lose your customer’s trust forever. That can mean more than a single lost sale, and depending on how public your failure to adhere to your word becomes, you could be dealing with a costly PR crisis.
When breaking your commitment is unavoidable, quickly apologize and offer something else to help them solve their problem. It may not be the ideal solution your customer was seeking, but with a rapid replacement and perhaps a refund, you’ll mitigate the risk of damage to your relationship with your customer and hopefully keep them coming back for future orders.
Superior Customer Service Is Key to Customer Retention
Even before the pandemic, excellent customer service often made the difference between keeping and losing a customer. But with more companies and industries struggling with disruptions beyond their control, it’s more important than ever to create and maintain that favorable impression with each customer to keep them coming back and revenue flowing in. Your business can ensure best-in-class customer service by responding rapidly to customer inquiries, being helpful proactively, offering round-the-clock customer service and self-service options, and staying true to your commitments to your customers.