Why Customer Service is Crucial for Business Success
Categories: BUSINESS
Customer service is important to the success of a business for several reasons:
Customer Retention: Good customer service helps in retaining the customers forever. If customers perceive that your company is providing better customer service than your competitors, they are more likely to choose your business over others.
The Repeat Business Effect: Repeat business proves vital to continued success.
Listening to customer feedback can help improve your products as well as services, which can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Providing good customer service is essential to building a successful and sustainable business from all angles.
What can you call good customer service?
These interactions are extremely important in keeping your customers happy with your company. They help shape customers' impression and experience with your business, even if your customer service agents are only a small part of your workforce.
Good customer service is the quality and timely assistance provided by a business and its employees to the people who use or purchase its products and services. Customer service can range from helping customers with their purchases to solving their problems online.
Providing excellent customer service is a great way to keep your current customers loyal to your business, and it gives them lots of nice things to say when they tell their friends and family about you, too. In the crowded world of marketing, customer service helps your business stand out from the competition.
Important Principles of Good Customer Service:
Providing excellent customer service can help you excel in many jobs and careers, especially in sales, customer service, consulting, retail, food and beverage, advertising and marketing. Good customer service depends on building strong relationships with people. Let us understand this by some facts-
1. Reward agents who go for the extra mile: People work for money but go the extra mile for recognition, appreciation and rewards. To get and retain top performers, you must create a workplace culture where employee recognition is the everyday norm.
As companies struggle to find a way to cope with the global economic downturn, the simple act of recognizing an employee in a meaningful and memorable way is the missing link that can reduce productivity levels, reduce employee turnover and create a sense of belonging.
2. Respond promptly: You should have several ways to find out what your customers think about the organization. First, identify which methods may prove to be most viable and beneficial for you. These may include:
i. Giving customers the opportunity to provide testimonials and reviews online.
ii. Asking customers personally about their views after they have used your product or service. You via phone, face-to-face or in writing.
iii. Provide a very short, simple feedback form or survey with an incentive to complete. The easier and shorter the survey is to complete, the more likely you are to receive responses.
3. Show respect: When your customer agrees to provide information, you should immediately thank them in return. It can be as simple as providing coupons for your products, some valuable information that is not readily available elsewhere, a free guide or e-book on a relevant topic, or special privileges.
Once you have started building a relationship with your customers, you must continue to engage their interest by offering news, information, photos, videos or articles of interest.
Once you've built a relationship with your customers, recognize that they may change their mind and want to unsubscribe from your club or mailing list. Make it as quick and simple a process as possible. This shows respect for your customer and their time, and also enables them to leave with a positive opinion of you and the brand.
4. Listen to your customers: Today's consumers demand transparency and honesty from the brands they buy from. They expect their voices to be heard, which means attracting and retaining customer’s means listening to your audience.
It is possible for you to speak too much, but it is hardly possible to listen too much. When salespeople are excellent listeners, prospects and customers feel comfortable and safe with them. They buy more easily and more often.
5. Train your team: It's important to make sure that all of your employees, not just your customer service representatives, understand how they should talk to customers, negotiate and solve problems. Provide employee training that gives your employees the tools they need to provide great customer service through the entire customer experience.
6. Know Your Product: In order to truly provide help and support to your customers, you first need to know everything about the products and services you sell. This way, you can quickly and easily help your customers with any problems or questions they may have.
7. Offer a trial period: With a free trial, potential customers are less worried about buyer's remorse and risky investments because there's no upfront fee.
8. Ask for Feedback: You can use customer surveys, feedback forms and questionnaires for this, but you can also make it a general practice to directly ask customers for their feedback when they are completing their order.
What is the most important thing you can do to improve relationships with your customers?
The answer is as obvious as it has been overlooked: Improve customer service. No matter how great your product is or how talented your employees are, one of the things customers remember is that they have direct contact with your company. A strong company will already have good customer relations. Good customer service centers on listening carefully to and attending to the needs and wants of your customers. Your relationships will stagnate if you're not constantly looking for opportunities to improve your customer service.