Good customer service is not only critical to the success of any business but it is equally crucial in building customer base and sustaining their loyalty. It is a mechanism for ensuring customer satisfaction and it also helps to set the roadmap for the future of any business. With rising competitive pressures, creating a highly differentiated customer experience can lead to higher customer satisfaction, reduced churn rate and increased revenues.
Though customer service is important for every business, it is all the more significant for start-ups. At this stage, every good review by a customer is a stepping stone towards success as businesses hugely rely on their customers for spreading word-of-mouth, achieving top of mind awareness and boosting sales.
Below are 6 points that highlight how good and reliable customer service can boost startup’s sales revenues:
Be Where Your Customers Are
Today, customers want their customer service needs to be met through social networking sites. More than the traditional channels, people love to use social platform as a tool to communicate with brands. So, companies need to embrace social media to offer customer support and ensure that their employees are handling requests on these platforms efficiently.
As customers expect quick response on social networking sites, you need to be able to respond to consumer criticism on the go. Providing effective support on social media leads benefits beyond customer satisfaction. It creates loyal customers and leads to positive word of mouth.
Always be Available
In order to deal with frustrated customers looking for support, it’s crucial for companies to provide consistent availability. There is a need to offer 24*7 customer support. However, if that is not feasible, let your customers know what times of the day you take care of customer queries and what is the average response time. This will help you in setting the customers’ expectations accurately.
Along with offering constant availability, companies must also ensure to provide support across all channels because some may prefer to call to get their issues resolved and others might like to chat as it allows them to do it at work or in a noisy environment. Therefore, make it convenient for your customers to reach you through any medium they want by being available on all.
Stay in Regular Touch with Customers
Always treat every customer interaction as an opportunity to monitor and build customer relationship. Companies can track customer feedback sentiments towards their business by being in regular contact with them. Frequent communication with customers aids in identifying and fixing problem areas.
According to a research, 96% of unhappy customers don’t complain when they are unhappy and 91% will simply leave and never return.
Below are few ways you can be in regular touch with customers:
- Follow-up with customers after meetings via mail, phone call or social media
- Send gentle and customer-friendly reminders to ensure top-of-mind recall
- Share blog post, videos and other engaging content that would be valuable to customers
- Send monthly newsletters with company news, product news and recent developments to keep the customers updated about your company
A reliable customer support team that knows and understands the customers well can drastically reduce churn and increase up-selling opportunities, thus increasing revenues for the company.
Be Sensible of your Customer’s Emotions
Customers are already in a state of anger when they contact a company to get their complaints and issues addressed. They may be upset due to a poor product experience or because of incorrect charges levied on their credit cards. Always be alert to these situations and handle them with empathy and positivity.
Customers want their problems to be recognized and solved as early as possible. So, by listening to their problems patiently and understanding and respecting their emotions, you can make them satisfied and contended.
Never Miss a Call
Unanswered calls can lead to lost businesses. In situations of high call volumes when your support team is not able to attend all inbound calls, implementing call-back system can save you from turning the customers frustrated. Abandoned call alert feature enables support staff to follow-up later on the calls that they have missed. This will impress your customers and showcase how dependable your customer service team is.
Handle Customer Complaints Effectively
Customer complaints and negative feedback helps in improving service by giving you the opportunity to hear what your customers think about your service. But for this, businesses should know how to monitor customer complaints and handle them. Take complaints in a positive sense- listen to your customers respectfully and fix the problem without any delay.
According to a study, 70% of complaining customers will do business with you again if you resolve the complaint in their favour.
Apologize to the customer, if required, and promise only as much as you can deliver. Make sure you do not disappoint that customer again. By effectively managing customer complaints, you can build a stronger bond with the customers and build better relationships.
In today’s competitive world, the easiest way to differentiate your company from others is to deliver exceptional customer service. If your customers will find you reliable, they will never think of switching to competitors and always remain loyal to your brand, thus boosting revenues.
