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Every company or organization that wants to drive sales should put effort into making their customer service top-notch. To achieve this, the organization needs a customer service team properly and professionally trained on ensuring customer satisfaction and happiness. This customer service team is likened to being the face of the company as a result of the fact that they are usually the first contact customers have with your organization. Don’t build a strong company, build a smart company. For while a strong company is satisfied with having great customer service, a smart company is always looking for opportunities to improve their customer service. Good customer service is centred on listening attentively and attending to your customers’ needs.
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The key to great customer service is:
- Know and Understand Customer Needs: What you think your customers require and what they need might not be the same and assumptions can be very dangerous in business. You can only satisfy your customers when you know what they require, and you meet that need for them.
- Personalize Customer Relationship: One of the keys to gaining customers’ trust and loyalty is treating them like friends as against strangers. This helps you to communicate value to your customers. For instance, greet customers, address them by their names, send personalized messages, find out customers’ needs by asking open questions, etc.
- Make Customer Feedback a Priority: Feedbacks are a great opportunity to know what your customers think about your business and its services. Neglecting customer service can have a dangerous impact on your business as you wouldn’t know when you’d lose your customers due to poor performance. Actively seeking customers’ feedback makes them know you value their opinions, helps you improve your brand, and helps you know, understand, and meet customer needs thereby ensuring customer satisfaction. When there is customer satisfaction, there is more patronage and sales. You can get customers’ feedback through personally asking for customers’ reviews, providing a simple and short feedback survey, running social media polls, encouraging regular customers to share their honest reviews on your brand and services, etc.
- Take Action on Feedback: Getting customers’ feedback and dumping them at a corner is a sheer waste of time. Making feedback a priority is one step, analyzing those feedbacks is a step further in the right direction. Sieve feedbacks, attend to complaints, reward your team when there are compliments, etc.
- Offer 24/7 Customer Support: Customers love fast responses and to achieve this, you require a customer service team working 24/7 to achieve customer satisfaction. You can do this by hiring multiple customer reps, adopting live chat systems, etc.
- Give Irresistible Offers: Most times, businesses and entrepreneurs make the mistake of ignoring this with the belief that this would hurt the company’s finances. On the contrary, this tends to create a seamless experience for your customers in the purchase and makes them trust your brand the more, and of course, trust breeds patronage. You can make irresistible offers by offering a refund policy of purchase, providing trial samples, discounts, free delivery, etc.
- Organize Customer Service Training: To achieve customer satisfaction, you need to work with a team that understands the essence of customer service as well as your stand on smooth customer service. Once in a while, conduct training sessions and seminars for your staff to educate and improve their knowledge on how to improve customer satisfaction and relationship.
- Check out Competitors: Keep an eye out on competitors in the industry and how they are providing customer service, you and your team could learn a thing or two from them.
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