Customer Service

Customer Service is Paramount

When your business provides excellent customer service, your customers will often become loyal for life. When your customers become loyal to your business they will talk about your business to their friends, family, and coworkers; perhaps anyone who will listen – and they will do all of this marketing for free. Businesses shouldn’t require money to provide excellent customer service in hopes of gaining a better reputation, they should genuinely be interested in making customers happy as part of their game plan. After all, customers are the lifeblood of your company and your livelihood.

It’s All About the Experience

There are several steps that you can take to create the best experience for customers, both existing and new. This is about more than just providing a great product or service; the customer needs to enjoy everything about your company, from your website, to your store, to how your team speaks with customers over the phone.

Customer Service Techniques

Check out these techniques for building excellent customer service for your business.

1. Know What You’re Selling
There is nothing more annoying than an employee who can’t answer a question about a product. You and your staff should be informed on how everything you sell works and why a customer would need it. You will make a lot more sales if your employees know the way to sell an item. Be sure that your staff is aware of common questions that may be asked.

2. Treat Everyone With Kindness
Every customer that walks into your store should be welcomed with a friendly greeting and a warm smile. If someone asks you for help, you should be genuinely interested in helping them out. When speaking over the phone, it helps to talk with a smile because it changes your tone of voice. People can easily detect over the phone if a person is happy or not.

3. Express Your Gratitude
Always tell your customers “thank you” whether they have purchased something or not. If someone walks in and browses through the store, let them know that you’re thankful that they stopped in. They may come back later with friends if they had a nice experience and simply weren’t interested in buying at the time. Never forget to thank the customers who do make a purchase, and you can send them off with a farewell greeting as well.

4. Provide Employee Training
Not only must employees be literate in what products and services the company is selling, it is also important that they understand how to handle issues if they come up. A properly trained employee will rarely need to refer to a manager.

5. Be Respectful
If a customer is unhappy with a product, try not to mirror their energy. Use a relaxing and kind tone of voice and remember to apologize even if you think you shouldn’t have to. Customers can get very emotional and it is important that you and your staff keep your cool in heightened situations. It can make the difference between getting a customer for life or losing one and risk them bad mouthing your company.

6. Listen Intently
Listening is an important part of communication, especially in the customer service sector. Customers will feel respected when they can tell that you have genuine interest in what they have to say. It will also help you to solve their problem faster and more effectively when you’ve really understood what they meant.

7. Respond in a Timely Manner
Customers do not like to wait. Whether that means offering to call them back so they don’t have to wait for an available agent or responding to an email, it means a lot when you can say you’ve received their request and are working on the solution. Just because you cannot solve their problem right way doesn’t mean they should be ignored. Communicate to all of your customers that you have heard them and will begin working on helping them with their issue right away. In a busy store setting, you might be helping out one customer and see another hover around waiting their turn with their question. Just by simply acknowledging their presence, you will be able to watch their demeanor change to a more relaxed state as they wait patiently while you finish up with your first customer.

8. Request Feedback
A successful business is always eager to learn ways to improve their products and customer service. You can gain feedback in several different ways. Questionnaires and customer surveys are popular techniques businesses use to get information from their customers. You can send these via email, by calling a phone number they provided, or some businesses will provide a website to visit printed at the bottom of a store receipt. As a customer completes an order in store, you can also ask them personally what they thought of the experience, or after completing a purchase online you can add a pop-up that will bring them to a page for feedback.

9. Meet the Customer’s Needs
Once you have received feedback on your products, services, and practices, you can incorporate what you’ve learned to improve your business. Perhaps people don’t like the way your website is setup, or the dreary colors on the walls in your store; take their input into consideration and keep on improving.

If you follow all of these techniques you can build customer confidence and your business will be on the fast-track to greater success.

Without profit, there is no business, and without customers, there is no profit. Customers are the sole provider of a business’ measure of success. Successful businesses know that their customers are their #1 priority in making a business work. Not only do you have to have new customers, it is even more important to keep the customers you already have. That is why customer loyalty is so important.

Small businesses and startups may struggle with their execution of customer service because of a lack of resources or time. So how is a small business supposed to face off against a large corporation? The answer is loyal customers. A loyal customer that has a satisfied relationship with a business and will often frequent the business, and go above and beyond for the business, too. Loyal customers often bring friends with them to their favorite stores and promote their favorite stores on social media. When you have created enough loyal customers over time, your business will be a success.

If you’re not convinced why you should be going out of your way to build relationships with the customers you already have, here’s a list of things a loyal customer can do for your business.

Loyal Customers Stick Around

Once you have a customer’s loyalty, you will find that they won’t visit your website a few times and then never come back, or stop into your shop and then you never see them again. A loyal customer truly appreciates what is at the core of your business, it resonates with them. If things are not going well in the business, your loyal customers will keep showing up and give your business the benefit of the doubt.

They Frequent Your Store More Often

A loyal customer may come to your store more often than they would need to, just because they like being there. If you own a restaurant and you have the same man come in every day with lunch, sometimes with friends and sometimes just alone, there is a reason he returns every day. He probably enjoys the food, but he also probably really enjoys being on a first-name basis with everyone who works there. He can come in and everyone says hello to him and remembers his name and his favorite order. He feels special at the restaurant because he is appreciated there. When a customer feels appreciated, then that is when you have created a loyal relationship.

Loyal Customers Have Your Back

Your customers probably shop other places when they have to for other things they need or when they are in a pinch. But they always have your back. Most people eat fast food at some point or another, and you probably have your favorite fast food place that you think is better than everywhere else. So if you end up at Wendy’s and you really love McDonald’s, you’re not going to run around the next day and talk about your Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger; you’ll still be lamenting about how you’re craving a Big Mac right now.

They Offer Amazing Feedback

Since you have established a good relationship with your customers, you can now ask them for favors. Returning customers make for great focus groups and usually have a lot of opinions about your products and services. You know that they are satisfied with your business, but they might have some handy suggestions you’ve never thought of before. Don’t be shy about mentioning a customer satisfaction survey – the ones most likely to take it are your loyal customers because they don’t want your business to go anywhere. Your loyal customers will always give feedback that will ensure that your business stays afloat because that’s their aim, too.

They Will Promote You

As mentioned before, loyal customers will talk about your product often, which then brings in more customers. Word-of-mouth is a powerful marketing tool because when a suggestion is made by a person that we trust, we are much more likely to go with their suggestion. An easy way to create word of mouth from your loyal customers on social media is to create a hashtag with your business name. Without fail, your loyal customers will post themselves wearing, drinking, eating, or whatever it is they do with your product, with the right hashtag in the photo.

We may not realize it, but our lives are ruled by the companies that surround us. Whether we’re job seeking from our iPhones, sporting the latest sneakers from our favorite running shoe company, or rolling out our Lululemon yoga mat to get in some exercise for the day, we’re surrounded by brands. And when these brands don’t meet our needs or fulfill their promise, we turn to their corporate number for help resolving the issue. Often, our only point of contact with these companies is with their customer service representatives.

A strong, positive customer service experience often leads to repeat business, referrals, and loyal customers. Dealing with a cranky customer service representative can tarnish a company’s reputation, customer by customer, regardless of how good their product is. Here are some surprising statistics about customer service and its effect on customers:

• 78% of consumers have, at some point, bailed on a purchase because of poor service.
• After one negative experience, a customer needs to experience an average of 12 positive experiences to reverse their negative impression of a company.
• People share negative customer service experiences 2.3 times more often than they share positive customer service experiences.
• It is 6-7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep existing ones.
• Consumers reported that 50% of the time, their questions were not answered by customer service agents.
• 75% of consumers think it takes too long to get to a real agent on the phone, and 67% of customers last year hung up the phone out of frustration on this specific issue.
• 70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer is feeling.
• 81% of companies considered to have excellent customer service are outperforming their competitors.

What all of this means is that companies who put the effort into developing an excellent customer service team reap the rewards. They outperform competitors, save on customer acquisition, keep their names out of the negative reviews, and get more repeat business.

Even if your company has a reputation for having awful customer service, it’s never too late to turn it around. Here is a list of the five most important customer service rules to instill in your customer service team-members, and frankly in employees throughout your organization:

1. Every Single Interaction Matters – No Exceptions. If you’re tired or having an off day, when the phone rings or an email pops up, you have to be able to turn it on. As a customer service representative, it’s important to remember that YOU are the face of the company to this customer.
2. You represent the entire organization. You alone are responsible for how they feel when they walk away from the conversation. You have the power to make or break this person’s day.
3. No Such Thing as “Not my Job” – Most companies known for their strong customer service instill an organization-wide mandate that no person is too good for a particular job. If help is needed, employees pitch in for the greater good of the company. Creating this sense of community and mutual reliance makes each team member feel supported and able to effect change.
4. Autonomy and Empowerment– When customer service representatives are trusted to make decisions on their own regarding customer requests (refunds, compensations, giveaways, etc.), this sense of autonomy makes them feel able and excited to help. Rather than putting a customer on hold to “check with their manager,” an agent can decide if, when, and how much to give to keep a customer happy. Allowing employees the chance to get creative can also result in huge benefits. Empower your people to do good work, and they will!
5. Incentive – As much as we hope to find a job we enjoy so much that we would do it for free, this isn’t the reality of work for most of us. So,
6. Incentivize your employees! Offer customer service representatives a bonus or reward for positive customer feedback. When incentives are combined with a good company culture, employees show greater workplace satisfaction.
7. Listen – One of the most frustrating things when you’re on the phone with a customer service representative is repeating yourself over and over again, and getting the same response. Good customer service representatives know how to listen, and actually hear what you are saying, and then respond accordingly and appropriately. Feeling heard is often the only thing we really need when we feel a company has fallen short or taken advantage of us. To feel heard can often validate a disgruntled customer, and soften their feelings of anger.

These five rules of customer service will help you build customer loyalty, avoid losing sales and build a good reputation for your product and company name. These aren’t hacks or tactics, they are consistent behaviors that the company and individual employee have to live by each and every day. There isn’t a shortcut for excellent work, but by putting in the effort to train your staff to listen, make decisions, and be empathetic, you will see the reward in your profits.

There are countless instances where companies go above and beyond for their customers and made lasting positive customers for life. One customer service representative ordered a pizza to the office of the man she was on the phone with because she overheard employees in the back say that they were hungry. An airline passed out free tickets to over a dozen passengers for answering trivia questions correctly. A representative from a shoe company sent flowers to a woman after hearing that she was undergoing health issues – AND she upgraded the woman to VIP customer status for life, for free.

There are dozens of stories like these online – proof that a little bit of kindness and extra care go a long way with customers. Answering the phone and being ready to handle anything on the other end with grace and understanding is something that can never be replaced. When it comes to customer service, maintaining this understanding of your customer can be enormous in not only acquiring customers but retaining them as for years to come.