Improve customer service

What is good customer service?

Before we get to the tips on how you can improve your customer service, however, we first need to define what constitutes good customer service. For customers, the customer experience is the most important part of their buyer journey. The customer experience is often rated even more important than the product itself.

That's why good customer service is characterized by a very high level of customer experience. You must be aware that interactions with customers are never neutral. Every customer contact is evaluated by the customer as either negative or positive. If the customer service experience is positive, the customer is much more likely to buy. Therefore, good customer service also leads to customer loyalty.  

For interactions with customers to be positive, customer service employees must be empathetic and able to understand customers' problems. They must also be able to pick up customers where they react emotionally. In short, good customer service is about fulfilling customers' wishes and responding to their needs. This works best when customer service staff listen carefully to customers.

First tip: Set up a FAQ page

Excellent customer service begins long before your customers actually contact the customer service staff. In fact, excellent customer service is characterized by the fact that it doesn't even need to be contacted. If you list the answers to possible questions and solutions to possible problems in advance as FAQs on your website, you save your customers from having to contact you directly. This saves both your customers and your employees valuable time. 

Make sure that the FAQ pages are easy to find and clearly laid out. Address all possible questions and problems and answer them in detail. Add to your FAQs if questions to customer service accumulate.

Second tip: You can improve customer service by setting up personal contact

Some questions are complex and the answers are individual. A FAQ page alone is therefore not enough. In addition, there are many customers who also post service-related content on social media or explain any problems they have had with the product. You therefore need to set up your customer service with proactive, competent employees who can answer such questions directly if necessary and can also respond to corresponding problems on social media.

Third tip to improve your customer service: Expand the ways people can contact you

Since every customer prefers different media to reach your customer service, your company must offer a wide range of contact options. It is not enough to provide just one phone number. You need to be broad in order to optimize your customer service in this regard. Consider covering all channels that make sense for your target group. In addition to the aforementioned telephone number, this could be email, a live chat on your website, a contact form on your website or even WhatsApp.

Pro tip: If you already have customer service by phone, you can optimize it with test calls.

In many sectors, such as the insurance industry or the automotive sector, it makes a lot of sense to provide customers with a customer service employee as a fixed, personal contact. This not only allows you to improve your customer service, but also to build a genuine customer relationship. Your employee knows the problems, circumstances and wishes of your customer and can respond to them individually.

This makes the customer feel valued, because he now has a competent contact person at his side to whom he does not have to describe his concerns every time.

Fifth tip: Shorten the reaction time 

Customers want quick help when they have questions or problems. If you want to improve customer service, you need to make sure that your customers are helped as quickly as possible. Even simple things, such as automatically confirming receipt of the request, can help to give customers the feeling that their problem is being heard. If you then respond very quickly to the actual request, your customers will thank you in the form of customer loyalty.

Conclusion

If you don't constantly improve your customer service, your customer relationships will suffer and you will lose sales. As customer service is part of the customer journey and needs to be positive all round for your customers to come back and buy from you again, you need to provide good customer service.

A good mystery shopping agency can also help you to improve your customer service.