Providing Good Customer Service
Poor customer service may ruin any business. Promotions and discounts may bring many new customers, but bringing them back is another situation. You may be gaining profits for your new customers but not that long. A good customer service can be weighed when customers keeps coming back and sending them away happy. Happy customers pass positive feedbacks about your business making others encourage to purchase your product or avail your services.
You may sell anything to anyone if you are a good salesperson. However, your customer service approach will determine whether or not you will ever be able to sell that person anything else. Forming a good relationship with your customers is the essence of a good customer service. Building a relationship with your customer is being measured not in what you say, but on your actions.
To provide a good customer service you need to ensure that you do the following:
1) Answer your phone. Make sure that someone is picking up the phone when someone calls your business. You can hire a staff if you need to. However, there are answering service companies that can provide you with a dedicated live answering agent to take your business calls.
2) Don’t make promises that you cannot keep. Reliability is one of the essentials to any good relationships as well as with customer service. Don’t say it if you are not sure if you can make it. This does not only apply to your customers but also with your client appointments, deadlines and etc. Always think before you give any promises. Customers will be annoyed if you break it.
3) Listen to your customers. It is very frustrating when you tell someone what you want or what your problem is and discover that the person has not been paying attention. Listen to your customers. After all you won’t be in your business without them. Making appropriate responses such as suggesting some solutions on their problems will let them feel that you care for them and their needs.
4) Deal with complaints. We cannot please all the people all the time. But giving their complaints your attention you may be able to please one person at a time.
5) Be helpful. Be helpful even if there’s no immediate profit in it. One best example for this is when I saw a man in a watch shop that had lost his small piece that clips together the pieces of his watch band. The man told his problem to the owner of the watch store then the owner had found something that the man was looking for that was just lying around. The owner charged him nothing for that. Where you think the man will go when he needs a new watch band or even a new watch? And probably the man had told his friends about the good deed that the owner of the shop has done.
6) Train your staff to be ALWAYS helpful, courteous, and knowledgeable. You may do it all by yourself or you may also hire someone who specializes on such trainings. Teach them the significance of good customer service to businesses and ways on how they can improve or provide customer satisfaction. Equip them with information about our products and services so that they would have an answer to your customer’s queries.
7) Improve customer service by making extra steps. When a customer asks for a help in looking for something, do not just say where it is located. Try leading them to the location, and for added satisfaction you may wait if they still do have further questions or needs. If you want to satisfy your customers and provide good customer service then taking extra steps is one great way. When you make an extra effort people will notice it and will tell it to other people, without telling you so.
8) Give in something extra. This can be in form of discounts, vouchers or even additional information on the usage of your product. And even a smile can be of help too. The amount of additional stuffs that you do for your customers need not to be huge, small things can be appreciated and people love to get more than what they thought they would have.
These eight simple tips when used consistently can improve your customer service and it can bring in new customers too. Outsourcing your customer service needs to a business process and outsourcing company is a cost-effective way of providing quality customer service.
