6 Tips To Improve Your Business' Customer Service

Good customer service is an integral component to every business. No matter what kind of product you offer or what type of service you provide, you need to excel in customer service. Ultimately, your customers wield the most power over your business - more than some people care to admit. Your profits are driven based on how satisfied your customers are, and while satisfaction is determined by several factors, at its core is customer service.

Why Should You Care About Keeping Customers?

• Getting a new customer can cost 6-8 times more than keeping an existing customer.
• Existing customers have a 12% higher profit margin.
• Businesses that retain existing customers see a 9% higher growth rate.

Simply put, you need to keep customers satisfied, and that means you need strong customer service. To that end, we have prepared six tips guaranteed to improve any customer service experience.

6 Tips To Improve Your Customer Service:

1. Treat Your Employees Well - All too often, if a customer has a bad experience it is because of a disgruntled employee. Perhaps an altercation put the employee in a sour mood, or perhaps a manager reamed them out. Perhaps they just feel burnt out by their job. Whatever the case, going the distance to treat employees well increases the likelihood that they will treat customers well.
2. Encourage Your Employees To Become A Consultant - Perception can be a powerful force. When an employee feels more independent, not tethered to their supervisor, it empowers them. Encourage employees to think of themselves as consultants. This will help give them a greater sense of independence and compel them to engage customers more pleasantly.
3. Never Be All Talk And No Action - Your customer service experience should never be all talk. If you tout excellent customer service, prospects are going to expect it. If their experience does not sync up with what you promised they will walk out on you dissatisfied, meaning no new customer. Worse yet, if they express their dissatisfaction online or even to colleagues it will not only hurt your sales, but also damage your reputation.
4. Actively Gather Customer Feedback - Go beyond conducting customer surveys. Designate one or more customer service employees as morale monitors who comb the Internet looking for feedback on your company - both the good and the bad. Never wait to receive bad news. The longer you let an issue persist the more difficult it may be to remedy.
5. Make Customers Feel Important - The more one-of-a-kind a customer feels the longer they will stay engaged with your business. To accomplish this, offer them price cuts or coupons, and make every interaction feel less like a transaction and more like a conversation, a brief social moment that is uniquely theirs.
6. Reward Customer Referrals - As mentioned earlier, customers are one of the greatest weapons in your marketing arsenal. Their word of mouth recommendations hold more weight than even the most dazzling marketing campaigns. So if an existing customer introduces a new customer to you via referral, reward them with a kind gesture. Even something as simple as a thank you card can go a long way.

Summary: The first step to improving customer service is making sure you aren't all talk. That said, we recommend mystery shopping your own business to verify how well your customer service aligns with your philosophies. Second, you can improve your customer service by improving the morale of the people on the front line. Third, empower your customer service staff so they are able to engage in meaningful dialogues with customers and make the kind of decisions that keep people happy. And finally, you need to remind your staff that customers are people, and should always be approached as such - not as just another problem to deal with at the office.