Excellent customer service means that your customers’ needs are taken care of promptly and enthusiastically. Clear communication, effective policies, excellent staff training, and creative problem-solving techniques are all necessary components of excellent customer service. On the other hand, unhappy customers can tell 8 – 10 friends and acquaintances about their bad experience. You want to ensure that any word of mouth your company gets is positive. It takes a lot of work to provide terrific customer care, but will also increase customer satisfaction and retention: two keys to running a successful business.
Know when your busy times are.
Keep tabs on when you are likely to have a rush of customers and when business is more likely to be slow. Make sure you have enough customer support available during crunch times.Depending on your business, you might be especially busy during the holidays, over the lunch hour, or during evenings and weekends. Your customers will be happiest if you have enough staff to take care of them during these busy times.
Please your customer the first time around.
Though many people think that customer service is just about handling complaints, it is even more important to keep your customer from becoming unhappy in the first place. It is much more difficult to make someone happy after they have been disappointed.Design your customer experience in such a way as to prevent customer unhappiness.
Define your ideal customer.
It would be time-consuming and costly to tailor your customer experience to every single unique individual. Instead, think carefully about who your ideal, typical customer is. Design your policies with your ideal customer in mind.
Develop performance metrics to measure customer service.
It is essential to establish the metrics you want staff to meet because if you can’t measure it, you cannot manage it. What defines good customer service at your company? Is it repeat visits? Average check-out times? Number of items per ticket? Quick response time to complaints? Problem resolution time? Once you have established this list and how to track your metrics, communicate this to your employees.
If one of your metrics is items per ticket, track the basket size of your customers on a weekly basis. You can find out the average number of items per ticket, then figure out ways to grow that number. Maybe you need to educate your employees on all of your products so they can encourage customers to add a few more products to their baskets. Or perhaps the shelves are not restocked often enough, so people can’t buy all of the items they need. Increasing ticket size may require you to hire more people to keep the shelves stocked or prioritize restocking right before the busiest times of the day.
Institute policies that make it easy to treat customers well.
You should provide your customer service representatives and employees with the proper guidelines for keeping customers happy. These might include proper greetings, procedures for dealing with unhappy customers, or guidelines about how long customers should be kept on hold.Make sure that these procedures are clearly laid out for your staff and that they are possible to implement. Consider providing them with a booklet or handouts to help them remember their customer service policies.
Be conscious of cultural differences.
Your customer might have different thoughts and ideas than you because of their cultural background. Make sure your employees are trained in handling encounters with people from other cultures to reduce the chances of cross-cultural misunderstandings.
Adhere to good phone etiquette.
Phone etiquette involves promptness, clarity, and enthusiasm for meeting the customer’s needs.You want your customer to feel like he is being taken care of, even if he is in another city or state.
Avoid negative statements.
Customers do not like being told “no” or “never.” Instead of using negative language, try to use positive statements to affirm your desire to help your customers.Be honest, but also emphasize how proactive you are in taking care of your customer.
Provide a call-back option instead of long hold times.
Customers appreciate not being kept on the line for hours. During those times when the phone is ringing off the hook, ask your customer if you can schedule a phone call for the near future. Have a customer service representative call your customer back at the designated time. This way, your customer will not become increasingly frustrated and will be able to go about his day.
Remember that complaints are useful.
Do not look at complaints as annoyances. Complaints provide essential information to a business. They point out issues that might be bothering many, many other customers. Tell yourself that complaints are a free form of feedback to your company, and they will allow you to solve new problems.