What is Customer Service?
Customer service is the direct interaction between a customer and your business or brand. Great service is crucial to your business success and can be achieved by creating and thinking like the customer, anticipating customer needs, and solving their problems promptly. Making sure you are delivering good customer service ensures buyer satisfaction, encourages repeat business, creates brand loyalty and following, and overall business success and longevity.
The Importance of Customer Service
Successful companies always put the customer’s needs first, and their policy is customer orientated. Having a consistent customer service plan can help your business in 3 key areas:
1. Retain Customers – Good customer service will keep your existing customers from going elsewhere. Retaining your current customers means you can increase your revenue as it’s a lot more cost effective to keep an existing customer than to find a new one. Making sure each person has a great experience will mean they will continue to revisit your products.
2. Customer Loyalty – Great customer service will ensure a customer’s loyalty and commitment towards your business, as well as them selecting you over your competitors. Having loyal customers is very valuable as it’s more likely they will come back, as well as pass on referrals to their friends and family – which means more sales and customers!
3. Increase Sales – Having an effective customer approach is important to be able to boost sales for your company. This can be done by providing customers with correct information, making sure problems are being dealt with, and treating each customer’s needs as a top priority. By consistently offering great customer service, you can not only retain the current business but upsell and cross sell future products and services.
How to Provide Great Customer Service
Map out the customer journey – It’s important to first map out the customer buying journey to fully understand the process to improve it. At which points do customers come into contact with your business? How do they come into contact (website, marketing, phone, in person etc)? What is the experience like at each touch point? Can it be improved? Only by having a clear customer journey map and assessing each touch point can you know where you need to improve.
Be Proactive – To be able to provide great customer service you should always be proactive rather than reactive. Sime ideas to be proactive could include: having a customer knowledge portal on your website, sending out regular newsletters with helpful information, keeping customers updated of product or service changes and contacting customers when things go wrong – not the other way around.
Get feedback – A good way to ensure you are doing things correctly is by asking for feedback from both employees and customers. This is a great way to discover your strengths and weaknesses and get an idea of what may need improving to become the best at customer service. Ask employees what are the most common complaints or reasons why customers contact us and work to alleviate them. Send out surveys to customers and always ask for feedback after each interaction.
Reward Loyalty – Loyal customers should be rewarded for their continued business with you. Too often companies offer incentives to new customers and forget the existing customers. Loyalty schemes are a great way to offer something back – maybe thought free products, discounts of future products, gift cards etc. Also milestone such as being a customer for 1 year, holidays such as Christmas etc are a good way to offer a little sign of appreciation.
Provide Ongoing Customer Service Training – Don’t assume delivering great customer service comes naturally to everyone, as it doesn’t. People need training and this needs to be ongoing to ensure continuous improvement as your company grows. Make sure staff know about company changes, new products, important information, and ways to improve. This knowledge can then be transferred to the customers so they receive a great customer experience and your employees will feel confident on the job.
If you are interested in Customer Service Training contact Sales Training International on +44 (0) 1704 889325 or email info@salestrainingint.com for more information.
