Customer Service Tips for Delivering a Positive Customer Experience
Strong customer service is one of the most important aspects of a business. Without it, many customers will not return and you will have a difficult time with retention. Research shows that 54% of millennials and 50% of Gen Xers and Baby Boomers will end business with a company due to its poor customer service. Let’s discuss a few ways to deliver a positive customer experience and improve your company’s retention rates.
1. Hire the Right People
If you want to deliver a powerful customer experience, it is essential that you hire the right people from the very beginning. It takes a certain individual to handle customer concerns and you need to look for specific traits and characteristics that come naturally. For example, these individuals need:
- Patience
- Flexibility
- Problem-solving skills
- Communication skills
To do this, it means you need to not only take more time throughout the hiring process, but you need to offer good pay and strong benefits to prevent high turnover and make sure the right employees stay.
2. Proper Training for Customer Service Representatives
If you want your customer service department to excel, they need to be properly trained and have the right resources to do so. Developing vital customer service skills is essential to taking care of the customer’s needs and addressing their problems and concerns. Training in this department should be a continual process and not something that you do once.
3. Gather Feedback from Customers
Developing the right strategies and plans to improve your customer service means knowing where your weaknesses lie and where you could make improvements. Customer surveys are an excellent way to gather this feedback. You can use various resources such as text messaging, email, or social media, to distribute and conduct these surveys. Be smart about how you gather this information if you want to improve response rates and gain valuable customer feedback. Think through questions carefully, keep surveys short, and even offer incentives and perks to those who provide feedback.
4. Focus on Response Time
The amount of time it takes for you to respond to customers directly affects how they feel about your customer service. According to one Twitter poll, customers would be willing to pay up to $19. 83 more for a service if they received a response from a customer service representative within six minutes. While responding immediately to customer complaints or issues can be difficult or seem almost impossible to do so, it must be something you aim to do.
Consider automatic form emails for email inquiries and make sure to regularly monitor social media channels and address any customer inquiries or complaints on these channels as well. However, make sure to keep these responses personal and try not to make your customer feel like they are just another number in a long line.
5. Show Appreciation
Not only should you help your customers through a poor experience, but you should help create a positive one as well. Tell your customers how much you appreciate their business by providing free merchandise, discounts, promo discounts, coupons, etc. Make sure they feel appreciated and valued.
Customer service is certainly a challenging job but is essential to the success of any business. By implementing the above tips and focusing on improving the department, you’ll have a much easier time retaining customers and improving the quality of your business.
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