Are you a business with an excellent product or state-of-the-art services, but you cannot seem to make your customers happy? Do your customers complain about waiting too long to get a response? Do you receive more backlash than appreciation?
If you said yes to all the questions above, then don’t worry, we have the answer to all your problems. The simplest way to tackle this issue is to make your customer service better and make sure that the customer leaves satisfied.
If the customer is satisfied, they will be putting in a good word for you. If the customer had a bad experience, they will find you to be unreliable, unfriendly and unhelpful as a company that they would not want their friends and family to know about.
Here are 5 ways to deliver excellent customer service:
1. Make sure you know your customers
Knowing the customer means that as a business you should be well-aware about the audience that you are targeting for your business.
To be able to know your customer better, you need to consider the following elements:
- Marketing the product
When you are marketing or advertising the product, find out the niche of the product that you are planning to sell. This will help you know the customer better. To make sure that you reach to the masses and the right kind of audience responds back, conduct marketing and re-marketing campaigns.
- Conducting surveys
Surveys are a good tool, too, if you want to start by knowing the audience before launching the product. Make a questionnaire beforehand that has all the essential questions you need to ask your customers in order to understand what they like and want from you.
- Focus groups are helpful
When you sit with a group of people, knowing their views about the product and what they expect from you as a business becomes clearer since you are directly hearing it from the horse’s mouth. Make sure you conduct at least four focus groups to get a diverse set of answers that will help you give a broader perspective.
2. Do not keep the customers waiting
As a business in the market, the next step to check off the list of effective measures to take for improving your customer services and relations is to respond to the customer as soon as possible. The truth is no one likes waiting and why should they? There are plenty of ventures in the market now to cater to their needs. A speedy and prompt customer service should be one feature to keep them coming back to you if nothing else.
Think of it like this: how will it reflect on you as a business when the client is put on hold for hours or sometimes days when your customer services agent is not able to respond to a simple query? How will the customer put their trust in you as a business by investing their money if you cannot even cater to one question or problem?
Thus, it is more than essential to have a trained and efficient staff for the customer services department as you never know what kind of customer you might have to deal with.
3. Always listen to the customer
No matter what personal problems you might be dealing with yourself, when you are doing business, as a customer service representative you have to make sure that you are smiling and ready to help the client with their issues, keeping yours aside.
Make sure you do not interrupt an angry customer when they come to you with a complaint. The last thing you would want to do is upset them even more. Hence, listen to them even if you cannot provide an instant solution right away.
Here are a few things that you can take into account when an unsatisfied customer comes to you:
- If you have to interrupt in the middle while they are talking, be polite
- Offer them compensation wherever possible
- Do not try to convince them that they are wrong
- Keep smiling and have a relaxed body language
- Make sure they leave happy and satisfied
4. Come up with possible solutions
When a customer comes to you with a complaint, they do not mean to degrade you as a business. Rather, what they are looking forward to is a solution to the problem they are facing. As a business, it is your duty to offer compensation wherever possible or come up with possible solutions.
Even if you cannot help the customer entirely, when they see that you are trying to put in some effort into solving the issue, they feel better and not completely disappointed by the service. It always means that you value their time and the money that they have invested in your business.
Here are a few tips for offering help to customers:
- Accept the mistake and acknowledge that the customer is right
- Show them that you are willing to offer compensation
- Maintain eye contact when dealing with a customer
- Apologize on behalf of the business and the inconvenience that they have been through
- Give them a refund if possible
5. Be prepared for the worst
As a business, you always need to think way ahead of the customer in order to keep up to the pace. You can never be too sure as to what might come to you in the form of a complaint by an unsatisfied and angry customer.
Always remember, it is the customers that keep the business growing and growing. You are nothing without your customers. Strive to serve them better each day even if that means that you sometimes have to go out of your way to make sure that they are happy.
Let us know in the comments below if you find these tips for excellent customer service to be helpful
