Excellent customer service is a crucial aspect that can determine the overall success of a business. If customer service is done well, it can help boost your popularity and perception within your customer base. If done poorly, it can put off customers forever, which can drastically reduce your clientele in the future.
There are many ways customer service can be implemented, such as through phone numbers, FAQs, forums, and so forth. If your customer service leaves more to be desired, here are a few ways you can improve it to ensure that customers keep coming back to your service.
Use Their Name
“Names are the sweetest and most important sound in any language” – Dale Carnegie ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’.
This might sound simple, but it is an easily implemented and extremely effective way of boosting your customer service. Studies show that people become ecstatic when they hear or see their name as it creates a more personal connection, which can help make them feel valued. Names should be used in emails, telephone conversations, chat rooms, and anywhere else where it can be appropriate. This is good as it humanizes the customer-business interaction.
Use Toll-Free Phone Numbers
Toll-Free numbers, also known as 800 numbers, are a great addition to any business looking to boost their customer service skills. The main reason for this is that having a number gives customers an avenue to look for customer support as well as generally stay connected. A toll-free number is also beneficial as it costs the callers nothing, making it far more accessible for them, which can go a long way into making the customer feel valued.
Toll-free numbers can help give your company a national and even an international presence as the number is not assigned to a single geographical region, meaning that anyone from around the world can get in contact. This helps make your business appear more established and trustworthy. They are also useful for the business as it can aid in marketing if you use a memorable number, and these numbers are easily transferable if your business moves site, giving your business an added bit of portability. If your business hasn’t got one yet, Kall8.com is a great place to get an 800 number.
Optimize Your Website for Customer Service
If your customers aren’t phoning you for customer support, the next most common location they’ll head to is your website. Due to this, you as a business want to make sure that your website provides easy to access avenues to provide suitable help. There are many different things businesses can implement onto their website to help, with each one serving a different purpose.
FAQs are the most common form of customer service found on websites. These are basic lists that run through the most common and most basic issues that customers might come across and provide straightforward answers and explanations to these problems. These are great to have as they can be effective in dealing with a high volume of easy to deal with problems, and some customers would prefer going here than speaking to someone online.
If customers need a more detailed and specific explanation, then forums could also be a good thing to add to your website. Here you can provide a link to an external source where people can post their specific queries and ger support from a member of staff or even someone from the community.
Finally, your website should also include a live-chat feature, be that with an actual chat room with an employee, or with a scripted chatbot, which is a form of AI technology that mimics human conversation to help provide solutions for a range of queries. Chatbots can be hard to get right, but once you make an excellent chatbot, it would significantly increase your customer service potential. These can provide more personal and tailored support and, for many, are the most accessible.
