Business
Three Customer Service Strategies to Grow Your Client Base
Many factors feed into providing superior customer service, including selecting business communication solutions, training employees to understand the company product, and reviewing customer feedback to improve.
Here are four strategies that will set your customer support teams above the rest to give you a competitive advantage:
1. Make it a Priority
Company longevity is not only achieved by attracting customers but also by providing a good experience for repeated business. No financial backing or marketing strategies will offset a bad reputation for treating your client base poorly. Word of mouth spreads rapidly over the internet from unhappy customers, and your sales will likely plummet if you do not retain public trust. To keep customer satisfaction a priority, you must supply your customer care team with all the resources they need and ensure that they understand their value for your company’s success.
2. Value a Customer’s Time
Customers value convenience and do not appreciate unnecessary process steps and being bounced around to multiple people with limited product knowledge. Therefore, ensure that your entire support team is well-staffed, trained, educated on your product, and prepared to support various requests in a timely manner. They also need adequate helpdesk software and understand how to use it for maximum efficiency. Finally, company representatives must admit when they don’t know something to avoid giving inaccurate information and further wasting the customer’s time. At times like this, researching the correct answer and promptly following up with the customer to close communication loops is the best practice.
3. Go Above and Beyond
Although a customer’s time is to be valued, this should never come at the cost of empathy or showing special concern. Relationships are built by patiently listening to clients. Motivate your customer representatives to be client advocates with ratings reward strategies. Train them to be friendly in email communications or during a lag time while pulling up account information by asking the customer how they are doing. You can also further empower your team to share client feedback at meetings.
Customer service is just as important as company financing, marketing, and sales. Ensuring that your employees are prepared to be quality client advocates will go a long way to ensure competitive advantage.