Customer service is a very important part of your business. It is the face of your business to the outside world. Often times, customer service and your product are the only things that your customers see in your business.
On top of that, there are other reasons you should put a lot of effort into your customer service. I have listed some reasons customer service is important and how to make it as good as possible.
The importance of customer service
Like I mentioned before, customer service is the “face” of your business to the outside world, including your customers. If your customer service is inefficient or your employees are rude to customers, if they have options, they won’t hesitate to go to your competitors instead.
Even if your prices were a bit higher than your competitors, and you had pretty much identical products or services to offer, most of the time people will choose the one with better customer service. It can be because things are more efficient with your customer service, or your employees are more friendly to customers.
It is also much cheaper for your business, to put more effort into customer service and that way keep your current customers than it is to get new customers. It is much harder to attract new people to buy than to maintain the customer base you already have.
People will tell others about bad customer service
People are more likely to tell their friends or post online about bad customer service, than they are when they get good service. If your customer service is the best in the world, you might get a few good Google reviews about it.
However, if your customer service is unfriendly and inefficient, you might expect a lot more negative comments about your business on Google reviews. When people are not happy, they will share their negative experience more likely, than they would when they get good service.
Numbers don’t lie. If your customers are not returning and switching you to your competitors, you will see that in your sales and revenue.
How to make your employees more friendly
So, how to improve your customer service, and make your employees more friendly to your customers? It all starts with the right people. If you hire nice people to your customer service, they are naturally nicer than people that are not made for customer service jobs.
After you have the right people, you have to treat them right. There is a saying that goes as follows: “Take care of your employees and they will take care of your customers”. I think it was Richard Branson who said that in some form.
That means, when your employees are happy and are happy to work with you, they will make your customers happy. Of course, you have to have the right people to work for you as well. It is hard to make someone happy who hates their job every second.
How to improve customer service efficiency
There are few ways to improve the efficiency of your customer service.
Teach your employees and give them freedom to do their job
The first thing is to teach your employees everything they need to know, so that they can provide the best service to your customers. This way, whenever your customers have problems, you have people that have all the answers to them.
Give your employees freedom to make decisions, so the customer service process goes smoothly. It can be, for example, that if fixing the customers problem costs less than 50 dollars, they can fix it without permission from you.
When you give your employees the freedom to fix problems, the whole customer service process will get much smoother. When your employees don’t have to contact you or their supervisors about every problem they face with customers, it will save a lot of valuable time.
Create a good FAQ page and keep it updated
A second way to make your customer service process easier is to create an FAQ page. FAQ is short for Frequently Asked Questions, and it can help your customer without even contacting your staff.
This will not only make it easier for customers to get answers to their problems, but also gives your staff more time to focus on more important tasks than answering questions they hear all the time.
If your customer service gets asked the same question repeatedly, it might be a good idea to put it on the FAQ page as well. Fill it as your business grows and you will make sure that the page is always on time.
Final words
This was a little bit shorter post about the importance of customer service. I think it contains a lot of information and hopefully it can help you understand how important customer service actually is.
It also can give you some tools to make your customer service more efficient and this way attract more customers, or at least keep your current customers coming back.
Other business-related posts can be found here.
That’s about it, have a nice day.