For the vast majority of businesses, good customer service is essential for success. While many entrepreneurs and business owners focus on marketing, new products, or promotional campaigns, research has shown that customer service is one of the biggest factors in a company’s success. Poor customer service turns people away to competitors, while good service creates brand loyalty and relationships with customers, increasing customer retention and revenue.
So delivering excellent customer service is important, but what exactly is considered good service?
What is Good Customer Service?
What makes good customer service? When many business owners think of customer service, they think of passively answering calls and responding to complaints or questions. While this type of customer service is common, it cannot be considered good customer service. This type of service may not cost you customers, but it won’t improve your business, revenue, or customer relationships in any way.
Good customer service goes beyond what your customers expect or receive from most other businesses. The best customer service doesn’t wait for problems to occur or big issues to arise. Instead, good customer service is proactive, working towards solving problems before they occur, as well as actively fostering positive relationships with your clientele. By providing reliable, friendly, and personal service with your customers, you can help avoid problems from ever arising and keep customers with your company when issues do occur.
How to Deliver Good Customer Service?
When trying to improve your business, don’t ask how to deliver good customer service. Instead, ask yourself how to deliver amazing customer service that separates you from your competitors. Here are some of our tops tips for delivering exceptional customer service.
Respond Quickly: When a customer has a problem or issue they need resolved, a wait of even a day can seem like a lifetime. Often, even delays that short can be enough to send them to a competitor. Customers want fast and prompt service. That means you should provide 24/7 customer service. Phone calls should be immediately answered, and emails need to be responded to within the hour.
Use the Right Employees: Customer service takes skills. When dealing with angry, dissatisfied customers, your customer service employees need to be able to resolve their complaints, make them happy, and keep them as paying customers. This is no easy task. Hire only the most professional customer service representatives who have proven experience in the field. Training and regular evaluation is essential.
Listen: Good customer service usually happens through listening. In fact, most customer service representatives should be listening most of the time, hearing out what the customer’s problem is exactly and determining what would be the best solution. Most customers with complaints don’t just want a resolution—they want to know that their issue has been heard and that the company will take steps to prevent it from happening again.
Exceed Customers’ Expectations: When you’re resolving a customer’s complaint or problem, go above and beyond. Your customers expect that their issue will be fixed. That should be the bare minimum service that you provide. Good customer service does more than just resolve a customer’s problem—it exceeds their expectations and leaves them feeling happy and appreciated.
Respect Your Customers: Even when an issue is resolved, customers want to know that their business is appreciated. Your employees need to be friendly, courteous, and speak with customers on a personal level. Customer service that resolves problems in an impersonal, cold way will still be seen as poor.
Don’t Ignore the Little Things: Sometimes, little things can have a big impact. Using the customer’s name, asking them how their day has been, or proactively calling them after a purchase to find out if there are any issues can all be used to increase customer satisfaction.
Our Excellent Customer Service
If you want to know how to deliver exceptional customer service, then 3C Contact Services is the call center that can exceed your business needs. We provide expert customer service solutions through both dedicated and shared agents. We offer a variety of complimentary services, including customer “win-back” campaigns, welcome calls, upselling/cross-selling, and direct marketing.
Need excellent customer service to improve your business? As the leading provider of outsourced call center solutions, 3C Contact Services teaches its partners the necessary customer service skills needed to engage and retain customers and clients. Call us today at 1-888-353-2335.
