Customer Service : The Key to Business Success

Customer Service : The Key to Business Success

After all your business can’t do without customers!

Picture this:  You’ve worked tirelessly to attract customers to your business, investing time, effort and resources to win them over.  But the real challenge isn’t just acquiring customers, it’s about keeping them delighted and loyal. With that in mind, here’s a question for you, how well are you looking after your customer’s needs? Are you actively nurturing those relationships, or are you unintentionally losing them because you don’t have the right tools in place to keep them?

In order to keep your customers you need to constantly monitor and evaluate your customer care strategy. After all, it’s not just about making a sale; it’s about forging lasting relationships.  So how do you gauge your customer care effectiveness, and what tools do you have at your disposal to enhance it?

In this blog post, we’re going to take a look at four of the most important elements of customer service: regular contact, testing and measuring, clear written process, and systemisation. We’ll also discuss how you can implement these elements in your own business to improve your customer service and boost your bottom line.

Why should you care about Customer Service?

The answer to this is simple, it’s because it impacts all aspects of your business and you ignore it at your peril.  Dramatic words I know, but I’m sure you, like me have experienced both good and bad service from companies and know how it’s made you feel.   In my opinion it’s important because it can:-

1. Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.  Customers who receive excellent customer service from you, become raving fans and are more than happy to tell people about you.  Who wouldn’t want that!
2. Attract new customers.  Offering excellent customer service is the best way to stand out in today’s competitive marketplace.
3. Reduce costs. Happy customers mean fewer complaints and returns, which translates to a leaner budget for customer service.  That’s not all, it also means that you won’t have to spend money on finding new clients.
4. Improve employee morale. Providing good, effective customer service can improve staff morale by promoting a sense of pride, reduced stress, and job satisfaction amongst your employees. Happy employees are productive employees.  It also means that your staff retention levels are high so you don’t suffer with high staff churn.  Recruiting and onboarding staff is costly in terms of both time and money.
5. Boost the bottom line. Investing in top-notch customer service can be like planting a money tree.  Your profits flourish because you attract and hold onto more customers.  Remember that finding new customers is like digging for treasure – it takes time and money!

What are the Four Key Elements of Customer Service?

In my opinion every business needs to have four processes in place to ensure that they deliver the best possible customer service.

• Regular contact: Imagine your customers as treasured friends – how do you keep these relationships vibrant and alive? The trick is to engage with them regularly to keep them coming back for more. So you could:-
  1. Send out newsletters / email marketing with interesting information and offers from your business
  2. Make sure that you’re engaging and responding to your customers on social media, doing this helps your customers to feel heard and loved.
  3. Make it personal by remembering birthdays and anniversaries. If you’ve got a loyalty programme every purchase becomes a reward and keeps them coming back for more.
  4. Pick up the phone and ask them how they’re doing. This is a great way of not only finding out more about them, it’s a great way for you to find out what else they’re looking for and you never know it might mean you can upsell more products / services to them.
• Testing and measuring – Think about it this way – you’ve got a treasure map and X marks the spot where all your customers are receiving excellent customer service. But how do you get there?  You experiment!  You try new methods and strategies.  Testing the results allows you to tweak and fine tune your approach so you can turn complaints into smiles.
• Clear written process for delivery: Avoiding complaints in the first place by looking after your customers is obviously best for everyone, but should a complaint arise, having a well-defined complaints process is key.
  • Clear processes enable your team to navigate the customer complaints journey with confidence, think of them as a map that means they can navigate their way through to a successful resolution.
  • It’s not just about having a process, it’s about embedding it in the business to ensure that every complaint is handled quickly and to the customer’s satisfaction.
• Systemisation for consistency: Think of it as a well-oiled machine; you take an order, make it and dispatch it, or if you’re a service business take brief, provide the service and solve the client’s problem. By taking a systematic approach you’re not only working efficiently, you’re also being transparent. Both you and your client knows what to expect from you and when.

What’s the secret to your business delivering excellent customer service?  Your first step is to ensure that your team members are all speaking the same language when it comes to exceptional customer service. In order to do this they need to follow a set process.

In order to get your team engaged with you across all areas of your business you could hold a Team Alignment Session, where you share your vision, ensuring that everyone is on the same page.

But that’s just the start!

Here are my five top tips that you can use to improve your business’s customer service.

1. Empower Your Team: Transform your employees into customer service wizards through training. Equip them with the skills to be polite, helpful and capable of going the extra mile.
2. Set Clear Expectations: Define excellence in customer service. Eg calls are answered after 3 rings, time deadlines for responding to complaints, make sure that you follow up.
3. Use Tech to Help – This might be using CRM software to track customer interactions or deploying live chats or chatbots to provide round the clock support.
4. Listen to Feedback – Actively listen to what your customers have to say. Their feedback is like gold dust when it comes to improving your services.
5. Flag problems as they come along, – particularly if they’re going to impact the customer’s project. You might be a website designer working on a new site for a client and run into problems switching to a new hosting provider, which means that there will be a delay of a week in the new site going live. Telling customers in advance means that they’re prepared and you’ve headed off a potential issue

It’s important to remember that customer service can be a tough and thankless task.  Dealing with a range of enquiries, issues and even irate customers can take its toll on any team.  Your customer services team, or if you don’t have one whoever is/are responsible for dealing with complaints, are the frontline heroes of your business and work to turn problems into solutions.

Tracking results becomes not just a metric of success but a morale booster.  It’s a way for the team to see the tangible impact of their hard work.  When they can see how their efforts have contributed to reducing complaints or enhancing customer satisfaction, it’s like a well-deserved pat on the back.  It transforms the job from thankless to gratifying, reminding them that they are indeed making a difference, one satisfied customer at a time.

Finally don’t forget to manage your client’s expectations from the outset.

This means being clear and transparent when selling to your client.  Be clear on what you can deliver, the timescale you will be working to and how you will track results.  It sounds simple, but believe me agreeing these at the outset will save you time and energy down the line.

In order to be able to deliver great customer service to your clients you need a high performing team.  My Team Alignment session is here to help, through it we’ll make sure your team understand and are engaged with your vision, creating a unified force that propels your business forward.

Click here to book a  Team Alignment Session or contact me directly by email or call 07952 112432.