Taking care of the customer is the key to long-term success. Keeping communication lines open and providing customers with a human touch to solving their problems all play a key role in providing better customer service.
Excellent customer service lies at the heart of a successful enterprise. A business that does not learn from its customer experience is consigned to inevitable failure. A company that cannot win the trust of its customers shows that it is not committed to offering a product or service worth paying for and thus cannot flourish. The inability to listen to a customer’s grievance is a hallmark of mediocrity.
Likewise, satisfying a customer straight away (or winning back the confidence of a dissatisfied one) fosters a sense of loyalty to a business and its brand. It is easier to gain and retain loyal customers than it is to get new ones. Showing a customer their willingness to go the extra mile is One of the most effective ways to show that yours is the company to keep.
A challenge for every growing business is ensuring that its customer service infrastructure is entrusted to the right people. Although many smaller enterprises may be capable of answering customer queries in-house, eventually a growing business would eventually need to outsource its customer service functions. Ensuring that your call center providers deliver responsive and helpful service plays a key role in maximizing satisfaction with your customer assistance efforts.
The Human Touch
Contrary to what people expect, the human approach to problem-solving is far from overrated. Human customer service representatives can often provide assistance for complex issues that aren’t readily resolvable by machines.
Having a skilled staff of human customer service representatives is also an excellent way of up-marketing their services. Customers overwhelmingly prefer striking a meaningful conversation with a human customer service representative to help them resolve issues mainly because they happened to be human themselves.
This isn’t to say that automation does not have a place in an enterprise’s customer service strategy. Artificial intelligence systems can help streamline the process of finding and resolving common problems encountered by customers, in much the same way as a customer can resolve their own queries by reading a frequently asked questions page. However, machines have their limits, and if navigating automated responses leads to unhelpful dead ends for some customers, a human option should also be available.
A Multiplatform Presence
Customer service involves accessibility and presence. A business should provide a means for customers to contact it to allow them to air out legitimate concerns and grievances. Customers should be given an opportunity to voice out the issues they’ve had with a product and bring up possible problems faced by the business.
This presence would allow companies to also focus customer issues in one place where they can be addressed rather than let them fester elsewhere where they could spread out of proportion and sully the reputation of the enterprise. Besides a phone number to call for customer assistance, a business should also maintain some presence on social media, which can be used to address minor concerns.
In addition, having multiple channels available for customer contact—and ensuring that they are adequately connected to one another—may help customer service representatives more effectively address customer issues. Customer representatives may even ask customers which channel they prefer to communicate early on.
