5 Ways You Can Improve Your Customer Service: Give Your Clients the Right Attention

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5 Ways You Can Improve Your Customer Service: Give Your Clients the Right Attention

As a company leader, ensuring the customer service your workforce offers is top-notch is essential. The customer experience directly impacts a company’s success. Along with boosting loyalty, excellent customer service often generates positive word-of-mouth, cementing your organization as a go-to solution for specific products or services.

Often, improving your customer service isn’t as challenging as it seems. Here are five straightforward ways to begin.

1. Offer Good Response Times

Few things leave customers frustrated as much as waiting. While minor delays are usually acceptable, ensuring your overall response times are quicker than what’s expected makes a significant difference. It helps customers feel valued.

Make sure that customers don’t linger in a queue any longer than necessary by working to shorten those times as much as possible. For non-synchronous communication – such as emails – don’t just rely on automated messages saying their email was received to make a positive impression. Instead, work to get out an initial response to formally begin the discussion quickly, as that improves the customer experience.

2. Creatively Solve Problems

When customers reach out, they often have a problem they want to be fixed. While many issues have clear solutions, some may require more creative thinking. By being willing to think outside of the box and solve problems in unexpected ways – particularly if it involves the company going above and beyond what’s expected – your customer service reputation improves.

Ideally, companies should give customer service representatives the ability to quickly explore solutions that aren’t necessarily conventional. While working in some approval processes isn’t out of the question, make sure that any ideas are evaluated quickly. Additionally, if a request by a customer service rep is declined, task managers with assisting with finding alternatives, ensuring a creative solution is found quickly.

3. Personalize the Experience

While many companies are increasingly relying on automation and generic responses when initially engaging with customers, these experiences are potentially frustrating. Customers don’t want to feel like they’re talking to technology; they want to engage with people who see them as individuals.

Use automation sparingly and limit any communications that try to steer customers away from your customer service team. When representatives engage with customers, don’t require them to stick to a script that could be inappropriate to the situation. Instead, give them a chance to curate the conversation in a way that respects the customer’s needs and position, leading to a better outcome.

 4. Offer Comprehensive Self-Service Options

While universally steering customers who call to a self-service option doesn’t always make a great impression, ensuring your self-service solutions are comprehensive is essential. Many customers do try to solve their own problems before reaching out. By having ample pathways to do that, those who are inclined to handle their own issues will do so and will likely appreciate that the options were available.

5. Deliver on Any Promises

If your company makes a commitment to a customer, live up to it. If you fail to keep your word, that gives a negative impression. Plus, it harms your brand, particularly if word spreads about your organization failing to deliver.

Make sure any commitments made are kept. That way, you’re meeting or exceeding critical expectations, improving the customer experience.

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Do you need talented customer service professionals to fill open positions at your company? Top Notch Personnel can simplify recruitment, making it easier to right-fit candidates fast. Contact us to find out more about our hiring services today.