Customer service is truly the backbone of any successful business. No matter how great your product or service is, one of the things that customers are most likely to remember is the direct communication that they have with your business. This is why businesses should always ensure that they strive to constantly increase their standards of customer service.
4 Ways to Improve Customer Service
In this article, we look at how you as a business owner can work towards improving customer service. Read on to find out more!
Look To Technology
One of the best ways you can improve your customer service that is to look towards technology. Business voice solutions are fast becoming a popular option with business owners all around the nation. Business voice solutions allow you intelligent call handling, can assist you in automatically distributing calls – all whilst being handled on a cloud service. Your staff will be able to collaborate with teammates, send files to each other with ease and make calls across various devices. Business voice offers you a complete, integrated work-and-call solution for your business. Utilize the latest in calling features and watch as your customer service levels skyrocket.
On the other hand, investing in a customer service tracker is also advisable if you frequently contact customers through email. It’d be good to note that the main challenge in email correspondence is tracking backlogs. When new emails come in, you may miss answering previous emails. As a result, you may risk losing the trust of those customers, which can result in a loss of sales.
A customer service tracker can help organize customer requests and support tickets. This technology can help you monitor agent performance and workload and allow you to oversee entire customer support operations. Moreover, you can choose a customer service tracker built with robust email management features, such as agent queues, a centralized inbox, and a reporting dashboard to monitor your key performance indicators (KPIs).
Seek Customer Feedback
Another fantastic way to improve your customer service levels is to get it straight from the horse’s mouth. Who better to consult that your customer themselves when you’re trying to find out how satisfied they are with your customer service? To provide excellent customer service, you need to understand customer needs and experiences. Most importantly, you need to listen to constructive criticism and aim to rectify any issues that your customers may be encountering.
A fantastic way to do this is to send out a customer service survey to all your clients, or set up a complaint system so that customers can voice their frustrations with you. However, when choosing the best feedback-gathering method, consider the client’s preferred method of correspondence. Asking permission from the start is advisable to protect the customer’s privacy and time. Moreover, permission helps your business stay compliant with privacy laws.
Connecting with your customers to gather feedback is a great way to iron out any issues that your business may be experiencing whilst at the same time sending out a message to customers that you value their feedback and are constantly working towards improving their customer service experience.
The Lifelong Learning Approach
Ensuring that your staff are continuously learning new ways of providing excellent customer service to your customers is an absolute essential. As a good start, you should always organize scheduled training sessions for your staff for them to continuously improve their skills. You can also create learning materials to help encourage a learning culture in your customer service department.
Some areas of important when it comes to training your staff are empathy, communication skills, and competency when it comes to knowledge of your services and products. Gamified language learning app for your customer service reps to learn a new language is also highly beneficial, especially if you plan to expand globally soon.
Customer service representatives should also be patient, understanding and strive to always leave the customer satisfied at the end of a call or email. Adopting a lifelong learning approach when it comes to training your staff will ensure that your customer service levels are always top notch.
Offer Multi-Channel Servicing
Last but not least, in today’s modern world where everyone utilizes social media platforms on a daily basis, it makes perfect sense to offer your customers multi-channel servicing. This means enabling customers to switch between multiple platforms and still be provided with the same high level of customer service. This can truly help boost your business’s credibility and reputation.
For example, offering both a live chat service on your website and means for customers to voice their opinions on other platforms such as Instagram or Facebook and get a quick response is a way of offering multi-channeling servicing. The last thing you want is for customers to take to social media with their complaints and not receive a response from your company.
We hope that this article has given you some valuable insight into how you can improve your overall customer service levels in your business. Always remember, happy customers won’t be able to live without your service!
