Let’s keep your customers happy and heard!
Customer service is all about retention: if someone has a negative experience with your business, you want to find out about it and fix it to ensure that that customer comes back. This is a part of your business that you cannot afford to neglect, and whether you handle it yourself or outsource it, you need to be sure customers have ways to communicate with you so that they feel heard and can get help when things go wrong (cause sometimes things do just go wrong!)
This goes back to branding but it's very important in customer service, too. You need to know what language and phrases to use when communicating with your customers, and it needs to be the same across the board. For example, is your brand elegant and refined? Then you would't be using words like "dude", "awesome", "bro", etc. However, if your brand is young and casual, those words might be in line with your brand.
Use this brand voice in all of your customer service communications (phone, emails, messages, etc). This presents a cohesive voice that people will start to recognize as your business, and it will help you build trust with your customers. It also makes your customers feel more comfortable reaching out to you and raises retention rates. If you outsource your customer service, be sure that they are using this voice as well.
In order to find out how your customers feel about you and give them an opportunity to let you know if something is wrong, you must provide them with channels to do so. This means making sure your social media accounts can accept messages, adding an email account to your website and social media, and even including surveys in post-purchase emails. Simply ensure that there are multiple ways for customers to contact you with any issues or feedback they have, and monitor them frequently to keep response times short.
Don't wait for your customers to reach out to you with any problems. Send out surveys when a product is purchased, encourage customers to leave reviews online, and maybe even consider starting a loyalty program. You want customers to trust you enough to reach out when somethings isn't right and allow you to fix the problem rather than just walking away. Going above and beyond for your customers is a surefire way to win lifelong fans.
Especially if you only have a few employees, you may have been reading through this checklist thinking "I don't have the people for that" or even "I can't worry about customer service, I have a business to run". Thankfully, with today’s technology, it's easy to set things up and let them run until you have a chance to get to them yourself.
If customers are asking questions about your products or services, create a FAQ page and link it to your social media accounts, or even set up an automatic response for your customer service email with the link. You can also add those FAQ's to your Facebook Messenger so that customers can have the questions answered without taking up your valuable time.
For customers with issues that need solving (if a mistake was made on your end), consider creating a document with text that you can copy and paste into email responses. Just edit their personal information in and hit send. With these systems in place, you should be able to respond to everything in less than 15 minutes a day!