When you’re running a small business, you’ll also be running between different tasks and departments in order to ensure everything’s ticking over as smoothly as possible. Your day might start answering emails, but you’ll also manage finances, speak with clients and customers, and manage your employees each day. In between all of these tasks, the crucial job of providing a fantastic experience for each and every customer can sometimes be eclipsed – elbowed aside by more pressing and urgent tasks. This guide’s about preserving a perfect record of customer service, even if your firm is swamped with work and tasks. Also, a Telephone Answering Service is a good solution for small businesses to improve their customer service.
Staffing
You cannot serve your customers if you’re understaffed. Small businesses that are attempting to cut costs by keeping the wage bill low tend to disappoint customers and clients, leading to a reduction in trust and respectability that can sometimes be fatal for the reputation of your firm. It’s far wiser to cover off any rise in customer service tasks by hiring a professional who’ll handle all emails, calls and social media feedback in their day job.
These professionals are easy to find online, and will often have experience of working in startups or small business environments. They’ll need little training, and will hit the ground running in your firm. If you cannot quite justify hiring a full-time worker, consider hiring one part-time, or on a temporary basis.
Technology
It’s not just labor that’ll help you get ahead with your customer service. It’s also software, designed in recent years to cut the time and energy your workers have to put into answering calls and responding to queries online. You’ll have seen two key examples of this. One is the phone answering service, which helps to automate your incoming calls so that when you’re unable to answer them, customers will be directed by a virtual receptionist to the appropriate line, or kept on hold. There are also different levels of service. For example, Replicant AI call center automation utilizes conversational AI to fully resolve tier-1 requests. When an issue can’t be resolved with AI, a Thinking Machine will transfer the request to an agent with details to make the job easier and quicker to complete.
Then there are chatbots, which you can use on Google and social media platforms in order to respond to the basic queries of your customers. If they’re looking to know your opening hours, for instance, a chatbot can be programmed very simply to let them know without the intervention of a worker.
Systems
Customer service is about excellent phone manner and empathetic communication. Yet it’s also about how you manage the journey of each customer, for the first time that they get in touch to the moment that you deliver your product or service. This means setting up a system that manages that journey from start to finish.
This is often called “customer experience management” or “customer journey management”, and it’s something that you can work on throughout your firm’s development. Learn from mistakes, attend seminars and lectures, and learn from the most experienced customer services professionals in the field in order to hone and perfect your approach. The most impressive and successful customer service approaches appreciate how a customer is feeling at every stage of their journey.
Feedback
It’s often difficult to measure how well you’ve performed when providing services to your customers. You may measure it by how many customers come back for more. You may, on occasion, receive feedback spontaneously, either positive or negative, that can inform how you approach the improvement of your customer services team. Still, on the whole, you’ll have a very narrow view of what you could change to improve your offerings.
The solution to this myopia is to send out feedback questionnaires. You can couple this task with a small discount or special offer to those customers who do fill in the form, seeing as this encourages repeat custom as well as getting you that all-important feedback. Always include a section on what you could improve so that customers can provide an honest opinion about where you might be able to serve them better in the future.
Consultants
If you’re at a loss as to how to improve your customer services beyond the tips outlined here, it may be wise to invest in the services of a customer services consultant, who’s been in the game for many years and has advised many companies on how to improve customer experiences. These professionals won’t take long to get to the bottom of any problems or inefficiencies in your firm’s approach to customer service.
When hiring a consultant, be prepared to learn some hard truths and to peel open the surface-level veneer of your business to allow them to peer into the bare bones of how you work. That’s how you’ll get the best, most accurate advice.
There you have it: five key ways in which you can improve the customer service provision in your firm in 2022.
