Creative Customer Service Advice for All Businesses

Providing excellent customer service is one of the essentials of any business. Whenever you communicate with customers, whether it’s in person, over the phone or using social media, you need to be able to help them with their problems. They’re looking for solutions, and they also want it delivered with a smile. Companies with excellent customer service will often gain loyal customers, even if it means they need to pay more for their purchases. If you think you need to improve customer service at your company, you can explore a range of options to make things better. Here’s what you can start doing right now.

Get Your Tech Sorted

Customers want to be able to get help and complete transactions quickly and easily. When you’re speaking to customers, you often need access your IT systems for a variety of reasons. You might be checking their order status or pulling up the customer’s personal information. This can slow you down if your computers and software aren’t up to scratch. Having the right IT support is a good step to ensure you can serve customers more quickly. You won’t have to worry about tech problems if you have an IT team ready to help you out. It’s also useful if customer service staff can troubleshoot minor problems themselves.

Keep Up Customer Service Training

Training customer service staff is essential if you want them to keep up excellent standards. Some companies make the mistake of hiring people who have customer service experience and assuming that they are immediately qualified to do their job. But every business is different and has different needs and expectations when it comes to providing customer service. Even employees who have been with you for a while will benefit from ongoing training to remind and update them of how to provide the best customer service.

Take Social Media Seriously

More and more businesses are using social media to provide customer service. Social media is a great way to provide quick advice, connect with customers, and refer them to other services they need. If you use social media for customer service, it’s important to take it just as seriously as you would other channels of communication. You need to have procedures and rules for how to respond to customers. In fact, it’s even more important as often the customer you’re talking to isn’t the only one “listening in” to the conversation. Anyone who searches for your company could see it.

Offer Round-the-clock Service

Some companies are beginning to offer customer services more often so that customers don’t have to wait if they need help. You might provide a 24/7 telephone line for help with your products, or perhaps have a chat feature on your website. Some people have someone running their social media for most of the day. You can outsource these services if it makes more sense in terms of money.

Boost your company’s customer service, and you could increase your reputation. Customers value great customer service over a lot of other things.