If you run a small and medium-sized business, you’ve likely already crossed an important threshold: the point where you can no longer have personal relationships with each of your customers. With every growing business, there comes a time when you’ll have too many customers and too many employees to manage them all on an individual basis. Though your SMB is growing, it’s still small enough that every customer counts, and you don’t want to lose customers just because you haven’t scaled your customer service alongside your business.
If you can’t have personal relationships with your customers, you still want to make them feel comfortable with your business. In order to do that, you have to create an illusion of familiarity and recognition with them. The best way to make customers comfortable and satisfied is through a customer service that is accessible, friendly, and above all, helpful. If you’re looking to revamp your customer service for your SMB, here are ten ways to do it.
1. Create a uniform service across all channels.
As an SMB, you now communicate with customers via multiple channels, including phone, email, in person, and online content. Make sure that each of these channels uses a consistent tone and approach when addressing customers. Establish the core traits that you want your customers to experience, whether it’s warmth, humor, humility, or friendliness, to name a few, and stick to them. Users feel more comfortable when they know what to expect from an interaction.
2. Engage with customers on social media.
Social media has long been downplayed as a form of communication by most businesses. When’s the last time you saw a business’s Twitter account reply to a customer’s tweet? It happens, but it’s rare. And that is a missed opportunity. The average Facebook user in the US spends 40 minutes daily on the social platform. Why not try to reach your customers on the social media platforms they are so active on? Be active on social media with compliments, replies, news updates, or just fun videos. Remind users that you’re out there and keep them engaged with your business. This is an easy way to make your SMB seem more personable to customers. You’re not actively selling anything or helping customers use your business. You’re just keeping them updated with things both serious and casual, much as you would your customers when there were only a small handful of them.
3. Make your customer service visible and proactive.
You never want a customer to feel frustrated because they don’t know how to solve a problem. To that end, a link to your business’s contact information should be visible on every page of your website and in every email you send out. If they are having trouble, they should immediately know where they can turn for help. Not only should your customer service be visible to users, but be proactive when contacting them. If you are updating the service, adding a special deal, or trying anything new, let customers know, so they don’t find that out on their own. Your SMB’s customer base is now too large for you to know them all, but it’s still too small for the world to know about them. Help your customers as much as possible, and you’ll turn them into loyal evangelists who will tell their networks about your business and why they should be using it too.
4. Offer a live chat.
Not every SMB needs a live chat, but for certain businesses, a live chat can be a great tool to interact with customers on your website. Technically, this is more complicated, and you’ll likely need to hire a solid front-end developer in order to create a live chat. That being said, a live chat is a great way to talk to your customers in real time and make sure they have all the support they need. A live chat will also help customer service employees multi-task as engaging customers via a text chat is less demanding than speaking on the phone. If your SMB needs to keep the customer service team on the smaller side, a live chat is a great way to free up hours on the phone, allowing your employees to get more done in the same amount of time.
5. Understand what the consumer wants to accomplish.
Understanding your customer is the simplest way to provide the best service possible. This is where user research comes in. Research the market and what your customer wants to use your product for. Then conduct usability studies and find out where customers struggle to use your product or service. Once you understand what your customers want and where they have difficulty, you can better cater your customer service to assisting their needs.
6. Let the customer be in charge.
As an SMB, recognize that you won’t always be able to respond to customers immediately, and customers don’t expect you to. What they do expect is that you will provide them tools so that they can solve the easier problems on their own. An effective customer service provides self-help tools, such as a help desk, guides, and FAQ’s, to preemptively fix a customer’s problems. While this takes some effort up-front, in the long run, there are numerous long-term benefits to self-service support, including reduced workload for customer service employees and increased efficiency. Not only will your customers be happier with these tools, but your employees will be too.
7. Leave automation behind.
Automation may be cheaper, but it undermines what you are trying to accomplish through your customer service. People prefer a human touch, so give them one. Your SMB is now big enough to have a lot of specialized employees, so hire someone specifically to talk with customers on the phone. Can automated emails and phone calls still help your business? Sure, but not as much as when they are done by an employee. Hiring employees to handle these tasks is expensive, but it increases personalization within interactions. Ultimately, having your employees speak with customers will increase customer retention, and as a result, will increase your sales in the long run too.
8. Document all customer interactions.
Speaking of personalization, document customer interactions as much as possible. For one thing, it will allow you to quantify the success of specific interactions and identify the best ways to engage customers, which will ultimately improve your customer service. Documentation serves another purpose as well. It will allow you to personalize future interactions with those customers and provide a sense of continuity and a relationship between your business and them.
9. Train your employees in customer service.
An SMB has a significant number of customers, and that means your employees will be engaging with a lot of them on a regular basis. With so many interactions occurring between your employees and your customers, make sure your employees know how to communicate with customers. This means having people skills and being polite, but it goes deeper as well. As much as possible, you should train your employees to handle all of a customer’s questions. No one wants to hear “do you mind if I put you on hold while I ask my boss?” It’s better to avoid those scenarios as much as possible. Also do your best to make sure your employees are happy. People are happier when they are talking to a content person. Don’t just focus on making your customer happy; make sure your employees are happy too.
10. Pick your customers wisely.
Keep in mind that not all of your customers will be happy, nor can you make them so. Do your best to provide the best service or product you can to your customers, but if they aren’t satisfied with what your business provides, recognize that maybe they aren’t the customer for you. At some point, trying to accommodate a troublesome customer isn’t worth your time or resources. Yes, you don’t want to lose customers, but as an SMB, you can afford to lose a few customers along the way. Your customer base is now large enough that a few losses won’t harm your business that much. There’s a lot of potential customers out there, so don’t be afraid to focus in on the customer base you truly want to tap into.
Conclusion
A happy customer is one of the surest signs of success in a business. If you can please one customer, then all you have to do is figure out how to scale that experience. Start your SMB out on the right foot by creating a satisfied user base from day one, using these tips to help you do so.
from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1OKu9t7 via transformational marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1IOzRxV
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