Good customer service is essential to your business success
Your business may have terrific products and services, yet can still fail to thrive if good customer service is not a top priority in your business strategy. How many times have you gone into a shop with a specific purchase on your mind and walked out because of a rude clerk or sales personnel who seem to ignore you? If you order and pay for an item online and then wait weeks for delivery or get the runaround, will you shop there again? Probably not.
Just as you expect to receive good customer service when you are the buyer, it’s essential that you provide good treatment and prompt responses to your customers. In fact, when good customer service is your signature, you can edge out your competition on this one factor. Unfortunately, friendly, prompt and responsive service seems to be a rarity nowadays, rather than the norm. Use this knowledge to your advantage.
Every business should have standard procedures for customer service policies which every employee must follow. If your business is mainly online, it’s especially important to cover the bases, as you’re not meeting your customers face-to-face. Therefore, you must work a little harder to form a bond with your customer base. If your contact page lists several email addresses for various types of inquiries, be sure each email is monitored daily.
Some inquiries, such as a catalog request, can be handled with an autoresponder. You can answer that customer within minutes, letting them know the catalog is on its way. Just be sure that the catalog does go out promptly. That’s good customer service. If someone contacts you with a specific problem, such as a product that was shipped, but arrived damaged, you want to jump on this and get right back to the customer with a resolution.
Even when something goes wrong with a transaction, most people appreciate and accept that a problem can occur, as long as you resolve it promptly. You may be very busy, but if you make your customer wait several days before they even hear from you, the next thing you know, the product has been returned, the order cancelled and the payment reversed. You’ll have lost the customer as well as the goodwill you would have gained by exercising good customer service practices. Too many reversed payment claims will also damage your standing with your merchant account provider.
A customer who gets outstanding service will remember that the next time they’re shopping. A happy customer also spreads the word to friends. If you’re selling cell phones, your customer who buys just one today, may well generate several other sales for your business when she decides to update the family’s flock of cell phones with you.
The easy part of business is getting a good product or service. Remember that good customer service is the backbone upon which you build a solid base.
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