Customer service is extremely important and it’s the difference between making and breaking your business. Responding to customers on time, solving queries, and keeping in touch with them is a vital part of building customer-business relationships. Customer service isn’t just important for old & successful businesses, it also assists in growing a newly formed business and retaining customers. In this digitally fuelled competitive business environment, customer service is more than important, it’s crucial.
Customer Service Has Become a Vital Selling Point
In old times, customers chose their company based on two primary pillars:
- Quality of product
- Price point
Today, industry standards and customer habits have changed drastically. Social media has allowed everyone to be an entrepreneur without spending much on advertisements. Customers have so many options to choose from, and that’s why businesses today need to retain customers by providing excellent customer service. Once you learn how to keep your business happy, they’ll keep coming back to your every time they need seconds. That’s how you make your brand stand out from the crowd.
How to Provide Excellent Customer Service?
If you want to learn how to provide brilliant customer service, then the first step is to ensure your customers are met with politeness every single time they reach out to your brand. Most businesses now focus on customer analytics and automation and fail to recognize the importance of customer services.
Even after a plethora of automation, customers prefer good old-fashioned human communication over reaching out to a robot and failing to get their queries solved. Customer will build their opinions about customer service the very first time they reach out to a business. Most businesses use an automated response system that isn’t met fondly by customers but it’s the need of the hour so customers can be directed to the right department. Once they finally find a customer representative, businesses need to make sure that no customer hangs up without having their problems solved.
Drawbacks of Poor Customer Service
According to a survey conducted by Microsoft group for people aged between 18-34. More than 65% of customers expect better customer service from brands than they did a few years ago. Businesses need to utilize every tool in the shed to meet customer expectations.
When customers fail to provide a good customer experience, the customers move on to some other brand with better customer support. As digital transformation has impacted industries drastically, customers won’t be shy about leaving a bad customer experience review on social media pages. According to studies, 90% of customers will leave a company without complaining, but they will tell their immediate circle about the experience they had.
The Tone of Customer Service Representatives is Crucial
While a series of digital-first options are available for customers, a majority of them still prefer to call a business rather than texting or email. That means, businesses (old or new) need to have the complete setup in place to answer customers’ questions and solve issues.
As a growing business, the last thing that you’d want to do is to lose a customer, existing or potential. Plus, it doesn’t really leave a good brand image. To make sure that every customer is answered, businesses can rely on automated answering machines or automated voice machines. It’s true that most customers don’t like the idea of interacting with a computer. But that’s better than losing a customer to non-responsiveness.
Investing in Customer Service is Crucial
If you’ve just started out your business, then you’ll need to understand how important customer service is for businesses. Everything from a business website, social media responsiveness, and the first interaction a customer has with a business sets the tone for customer experience.
You can’t risk sending customers to voicemail, or having them call you over and over again, which will ultimately lead to you losing customers. Invest a portion of your capital into building robust customer service solutions.