Customers should never feel uncomfortable and out of place at your business; instead, they should be immediately put at ease when they walk through the door. Invest in a few comfortable chairs if your customers typically have to wait to see someone. Provide products such as a UV sanitizer to address any concerns you customers may have regarding the sanitation of your premises.
Here are some more ways to keep your customers happy and satisfied.
1. Evaluate Your Present Position
Before you can begin a customer service makeover, it is important to evaluate where you are currently with your service quality. Survey customers and spend some time on the front line observing how your customer service agents interact with clients that come in to your place of business. Record some phone calls or analyze a few live chat sessions. This data will provide you with a starting point for your service transformation by giving you an idea where you are currently and what areas would benefit most from improvement.
2. Know What Your Customers Want
The main objective of excellent customer service is to satisfy the customers by catering to their needs. It is important to communicate with customers and find out what they are looking for. Knowing this critical information allows companies to provide a phenomenal customer service experience. The more satisfied a customer is, the more likely it is that they will become loyal customers.
3. Get to Know Your Customers
Make the effort to get to really know your customers and understand their needs. The best way to do this is to ensure that all customer service representatives are patient and calm to understand what the customer is requesting. One suggestion is that if a representative develops a good repertoire with a customer, they share the information they have learned about the customer with the rest of the team.
4. Learn Names
Following on from the above, learning the first and last names of your customers is a technique guaranteed to make them feel special the minute they walk through your door. Disney Cruise Line announces each passenger by name throughout the ship’s lobby when the customer boards the boat for the first time. Your customers should get that same special feeling when they walk through your business doors.
5. Empower Your Representatives
Customer service representatives need to be empowered to do the best job they can. Empowerment comes through training that provides the confidence they need to make good decisions and resolve problems.
Employees need to know which policies are set in stone and which ones can be bent to accommodate good customers. They need to know how to replace the word “can’t” with “can” and how to meet customer needs within the boundaries of the job.
6. Teach Your Products and Services
You can spend all your time teaching employees how to communicate with customers and handle customer complaints, but if they don’t know your products and services inside and out, they are sure to frustrate the customers they serve. Employees need to be prepared to answer any and all questions thrown at them by customers, which requires a thorough knowledge of every product a customer might purchase from your company.
7. Celebrate with Your Customers
Whether it is a national holiday or your customer’s birthday, acknowledge those dates with a card, special discount or even cookies in your lobby. Pleasantly surprising your customer is one of the most effective ways to build a happy and satisfied customer base that builds on itself through positive word-of-mouth advertising.
