If you are a business owner, your customers are extremely important to you. They are the ones that provide you with income and revenue, and the existence of your business depends on them. The simple fact is that customers have a number of choices open to them and every business has to be face a significant amount of competition from other companies operating in the same space; they may be providing products/services that are very similar to what you provide.
So how then can you stand out from the crowd? The one way to do this is to provide outstanding customer service. Since every company functions on different lines, you would have to decide which service strategy would work best for your company; here are some aspects to consider:
Things to Consider for Outstanding Customer Service
#1 Training
This is an important factor; your employees should be trained well enough to handle customer queries in an effective and efficient manner. The objective should be that your employees have to be engaging, responsive, professional and friendly with your customers. When your employees’ knowledge and customer service is up-to-the-mark, it helps ensure that your customers have a good experience every time they come in contact with your company.
#2 Knowledge
As mentioned earlier, information and knowledge are extremely important and you will find that successful companies invest a significant amount of time, effort and money into collecting information. They are extremely proactive with conducting surveys and encouraging customer feedback. They make efforts to collect comprehensive information about demographic, competition and the industry, and make efforts to ensure that all this data is current.
If you have all the right information, you will be automatically able to anticipate what your customer’s needs are, in a much better way. Using all the knowledge and data you collect, is the one way to improve the customer service quotient of your company.
#3 Responsiveness
The priority should be to make your customer service very responsive; and you would be able to do this by ensuring that your customers have multiple communicate channels open to them, to stay in touch with you. You can do this by:
- Adding “ Contact Us” and “ Feedback” forms to your site
- Displaying your customer service numbers on your business website
- Adding live chat to your site. This is an excellent tool and your customers are able to quickly access information and get assistance when they need it. However, the customer service representative that is at the other end of the chat has to be responsive and knowledgeable. A live chat system helps ensure your customers have a great experience.
#4 Listen to your customers
Successful companies always listen to what their customers are saying and ensure they are aware of what the latter’s experiences and sentiments are. It’s important to apply a high level of attentiveness to any interactions you have with your customers. Pay careful attention to what they are saying, keep them engaged in conversation and value their feedback & opinions.
Look upon every interaction with your customers, as an opportunity to understand what their needs are, ask them for suggestions on improvement and make every effort to develop a good rapport with them. This will help you keep in sync with their personal & current information, which in turn will help improve the customer care services your company provides.
We at MaxMyProfit are passionate about our job of coaching business owners to explore different ways of expanding and improving their business. If you want any information about our services, programs, events and podcasts etc., do visit our website. You can also connect with us via this online form or speak with us at this number – (02) 88085500
About the Author
Ben Fewtrell is a sought-after Business Coach, Keynote Speaker and trainer who has featured in Virgin’s Inflight Magazine and Entertainment Portal, SKY Business and “Secrets of Top Business Builders Exposed”. He is also the host of the popular Business Brain Food Podcast where he interviews leading experts on anything and everything business.
