7 Ways to Ensure Great Customer Service
When young businesses start out with a modest number of customers, the quality of customer service tends to be more personalized and intimate. Maintaining consistency, however, can be challenging as the number of customers grows.
1. Scale Your Team
As you grow, make sure someone on your team is emailing, calling, or contacting clients on a regular basis. Keep ahead of any issues before they arise. If there is an issue, get back to the client within 12 to 24 hours. As you bring on more clients, scale your support as well.
2. Don't Neglect Support Response Time
While most businesses don't put an actual ROI or financial return on their support team, it's extremely important to have this in place. Customers want their support emails, questions, and tickets answered as soon as possible. Anything longer than 12 to 24 hours is now unacceptable. No matter how much growth your company is seeing, make sure to always expand your support team along with it.
3. Get a Few Interns
When you're cash-strapped but need bandwidth for customer service, get a few interns to help ensure that you respond to customers quickly and efficiently.
4. Be Humble
Remaining humble during growing pains will allow your mind to stay focused. Thomas Merton famously said, "Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real."
5. Always Address Each Customer Service Situation
Never ignore customers (even "problem" ones). If you can't resolve an issue immediately, respond and let the customer know what steps you are taking to reach a resolution. Although you will never make every single customer happy, giving an explanation in a friendly and timely manner is great customer service. Most customers will appreciate it regardless of the outcome.
6. Institutionalize Great Customer Service Habits
Many companies have institutionalized great customer service at scale. The key is to reward behaviors that lead to great customer service. Get your incentives right and you'll see an organic change in the organization.
7. Be Available and Follow Up
The most important thing is staying available and accessible. This could mean hiring an intern to handle email and phone inquiries, or outsourcing a live chat support. Following up is crucial, so once your volume of clients grows, you can automate the follow-up system with a courtesy email or a pop-up asking for feedback.
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