How You Can Improve Your Customer Service.

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When it comes to business, your number one priority should be building great relationships with your customers. Getting someone to buy something from you once is great, but getting them to return after that? That’s the way for you to be extremely successful and to make great money. The best way to get that repeat business is to make sure that your customer service is top-notch. Here are some tips on how you can do that.

Make It Easy

First of all, make the entire process as easy as possible for your customers. Look at your website, and make sure that it’s easy to navigate, that the colour of the text doesn’t make it difficult to read against the background, that the location of your contact information is obvious and easy to click on. Make the mission statement of your company easy to find so that people can work out what you do with minimal hassle, and make the buying process easy.

You don’t need to put in numerous windows – all you need is to make sure that the process is secure and uncomplicated. Don’t underestimate how short people’s attention spans are, or how quickly they give up on buying something if it isn’t easy – there is a lot of competition out there and it would be easy for them to find another similar store and product.

If you deal with physical stores, it should also be as easy and convenient as possible: select a store location with plenty of parking that’s easy to find, make sure that prices are obvious on the items and that labels are all correct and up to date, and that the store runs in a logical way so that different products are easy to find.

Suits you sir!

Train Your Team

Obviously you need to work on your own customer service skills, but once you’ve absolutely nailed them, it’s time to pass them on to your team. When you’re part of a sales team, a victory for one of you signals a victory for all of you, especially if you have team targets to hit, so it’s important to share methods and information.

If you’re working in a communal space, get new hires to listen to the more experienced members of staff when they’re making phone calls, so they work out how to speak to people effectively on the phone. Likewise, pair less experienced staff with employees who really know what they’re doing in a mentoring buddy system when it comes to sales calls. It’s important to make sure that your team realises exactly what is required of them and what they need to do in order to succeed and to keep customers coming back.

Improve Your In-Team Communication

It’s important to make sure that you keep communicating effectively with the people on your team. Share your targets and how far you are to reaching them, and how you can do better, and how you can encourage others to do better. You should also make sure that you use a sales program so that you can coordinate exactly what you’re all doing individually.

It can be easy to accidentally call clients multiple times if you haven’t made a note of it on a program like Sales Force, and not only is that annoying for them, but it also makes the company look dysfunctional and disorganised. Keep talking to each other, keep sharing information, and make sure everybody is always in the loop.

Create A Personal Service

If you’re running a small company, you’ll be well aware that big online marketplaces like Amazon find it easy to take away business – they will be able to offer products at lower prices and have years of experience to have perfected a customer service system that works for them. That means that you need to find a customer service system that works for you – and for many companies, that entails making it personal. Get to know your regular customers, strike up a conversation with them, and take a genuine interest in their lives.

If you aren’t great with names or facts, store them in a file on your computer that you can pull up every time you give them a call. You should make sure that you know the products and services that you’re selling inside out and that you can recommend further products and extensions on the services that they are already paying for – as well as reasons that they’re necessary. People will come to you for your in-depth knowledge and your personal touch – there are absolutely customers out there who are willing to pay more to get that excellent service.

Add Extra Security

One of the most important things about your relationship with your customers is that you should make them feel as safe as possible. Some people like to take risks – who doesn’t love a rollercoaster? But when it comes to buying a product or service, everybody wants to play it safe. Make sure that your online system encrypts all information and data so that it’s impossible to hack, and that your customers are invited to create passwords that are difficult (add capital letters, numbers and symbols).

Within the office, you should install anti-virus software and firewalls, along with the same password protection, so that anyone wanting to hack your computers would be unable to. Finally, if you work in a store, check out security companies who can make sure your store is safe at all times – and who can prevent the retail staff from worrying too much about the possibility of shoplifters and theft. Seeing security at the door will make shoppers feel safe and secure.

Get On Social Media

A great way to communicate with your customers is via social media. There are a lot of more old-school companies out there who find the idea of sending out a tweet to be confusing – if that sounds like you, or like your boss, it might be time to hire a social media expert who can create a social media strategy that works for what you and your company are doing.

If you want to tackle it yourself, it’s important to remember that you can use different forms of social media for different purposes. If you want to build up a community, particularly one that tackles parents and families, Facebook is an excellent way to do that. It’s also a way that you can easily promote services and events in local areas. Instagram is a perfect platform to use if you’d like to show off the aesthetic of your product and to create a specific look. You need to make sure that you’re decent at using image editing software if Instagram sounds like something that you might want to go for.

Finally, Twitter is a great way for you to get in touch with people. It’s a way that you can interact with other brands and with customers – particularly those who might want to get in touch if they have an issue with your product – and it’s a way to endear yourself to people by creating a specific voice. It’s also an extremely easy way to ask for feedback, whether you’re getting people to vote on which lipstick shade should be released next and what it should be called, or whether you’re linking to a survey that logs the way that people use your company and how they feel about it.

Great customer service is absolutely key to getting your company off the ground and making it successful.

About the author

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Like Minds is a global thought leadership platform delivering world class events on business development, knowledge and insight aimed at entrepreneurs and business leaders to engage, stimulate and empower them to become global businesses of the future. We also offer a bespoke service for corporate clients and training programmes under the Like Minds U brand. For more information please email bespoke@wearelikeminds.com