One of the most important things that any business needs to make sure of is that it is being as good to its customers as is possible to do. But in order to make that happen, you need to know what is actually involved in that process – and that is something that can be very challenging indeed to make a reality.
One of the most important things here is ensuring that you are always there for your customers, in whatever way you can be. Once you start to look into it, you will see that there are a huge number of things you can and should be doing in order to be there for your customers more, and in this article, we are going to take a look at just some of the most important. Follow these, and you should find that you are doing right by your customers in no time.
Answer Email Quickly
For many customers these days, email is the number one way in which they will want to communicate with your business most of the time. It, therefore, follows that you need to make sure that you are responding to those emails quickly, otherwise your customers will not easily feel as though you really care about them. But it can be surprisingly hard to make sure that you are doing this, especially when things get busy in the office. However, by paying attention to a few of the most important things that you can do, you will find that you can make this a little easier – and so enjoy the benefits that come from it.
The most important thing is to make sure you have enough customer services staff, and that they make a point of actively checking their email regularly. One of the problems which can occur a lot of the time is that nobody is quite sure who needs to respond to what kind of email and take action on it.
That can mean that nobody ends up answering it and before you know it the customer is left hanging in a way that you had not planned for. Clearly, this is far from an ideal situation to be in, and the solution is to ensure that your employees each know what it is that they should be doing. Everyone should have a clear notion of what their responsibilities are and what is expected of them so that this kind of situation can’t occur too often.
It’s also important to make sure that you have an automated out of office response set up for when there is nobody there to receive emails. You’ll find that it really helps to keep customers happy, and shows that you still care even when you are away from the office – be it for a day or a week. Email is important, so make sure you don’t underestimate it if you want to keep your customer as happy as possible.
Give Your Staff Mobile Devices
One of the clearest signs that you are always there for your customer is that they are able to contact you whenever they might need to, for whatever reason. That is something which is easier to make true than you might think. You can ensure that you are able to respond to people even outside traditional office hours merely by furnishing your customer services staff with mobile devices.
Although you might not think this is a very popular idea at first, the truth is that paying your employees just a little bit more is going to make it worth their while. You then have the ability to route phone calls through to mobiles, which can absolutely be a great thing for your customer.
There are a few things you will need to think about here, however, to ensure that it goes to plan in the way that you would hope. For a start, you will find that it is still necessary to try and keep the same compliance in order, even when your employees are answering calls from home. That can be hard to do, but there are some great ways you can make it a little easier.
One of the first things you will want to do is to make sure you are enabling IT admins to enforce policies on mobile devices, so that all the same rules apply. Clearly, the devices will be business-owned, and not private, so this will be easy enough to do. You should also make sure that your employees are clear that such phone calls will still be official business, and should be treated as such.
Done right, this is one of the most powerful ways you can show the customers how much you appreciate them being there. It’s worth considering if you are thinking about trying to improve your customer services greatly.
Apps
An increasingly popular and powerful way to empower the customer to be able to contact you is to look into providing some kind of a service app for them. If you think about it, there are probably many of these that you already use as a consumer, and which are bound to be useful in your line of work too.
It might be that such an app can be a way to access your online services, if that is applicable, or it could merely be a kind of help app. You could have a live chat request service on there, along with the other contact details, and in this way, it could be a pretty effective means of your customer getting in touch with a query or problem. Many customers respond to this very well, and it is absolutely something you should consider.
As long as you are showing your customer that you are there for them, you will find that they respond much more positively to your company on the whole. In time this will lead to a better relationship and a much more successful future for the business.
