When you run a business, you have many different strands to manage successfully, and customer service should be right up towards the top of your list of priorities. Unfortunately, many businesses find themselves making the same mistakes again and again. So, make an effort to sidestep some of the common pitfalls with this brief guide below.
Not Having a Clear Strategy in Place
When deciding your approach to customer service, there are several different factors to bear in mind. How are you going to address your customers – in a formal or a more casual manner? Are you going to use software like a customer relationship management (CRM) application. What is a CRM? It’s a way for you to keep in touch with customers and let them know what is going along with their deliverables.
Not Providing Enough Training
Your customer service agents need to be fully trained on your strategy and how they are going to deal with customer complaints and enquiries. They also need to be provided with full mentoring on all the different aspects of customer service including managing the phone lines, dealing with live chat, and handling social media. Customer service is something of an art form these days and needs to be treated as such.
Not Being Available to Customers
Customers expect companies to be available to them in various different ways. In a world in which many consumers are impatient and living in different parts of the world, if you provide too many restrictions on how they can get in touch with your business, you may well find that they are going to go to a business that has a greater sense of availability. The Internet is an invaluable tool that allows you to contact people all over the world, so make sure that you use it to its fullest extent.
Failing to Listen to Customers
A big part of good customer service involves listening to your customers. Without doing this, you are not going to learn about their core complaints, and you will not discover new ways that you can improve your service offering to them. Often, a big part of why customers get in touch with your company in the first place is to give them an opportunity to vent about their issues. Once you have given them the opportunity to do this, you can then set about finding a solution to their issue.
Failing to Offer a Solution
While customers do often get in contact with businesses to vent, they are often also looking for a tangible solution to their issue, so you should be encouraging a culture of resolution amongst your customer service team.
Avoiding these common customer service mistakes will go a long way towards making your business better able to provide the kind of service that gets people talking in a positive way about your company and encourage that all-important word of mouth marketing that is so difficult to obtain.
