Improving customer service shouldn’t be a one-time task. But while improving customer experience is a continual process, that doesn’t mean each step will take businesses months to integrate. By taking baby steps to improve how customers feel after working with you, you can boost your sales, gain new lifelong customers and more — without the wait. Here are five ways you can improve your small business’ customer service, with tasks you can start on today.
Motivate your team.
As the business owner, chances are, your employees have more face-to-face interaction with your customers than you do. A grumpy employee can quickly ruin all your efforts to improve customer service. Try offering extra motivation for employees — take the employee that gets the best comment card out to lunch, start a fun contest for employees, or simply send each employee a note to let them know that they are appreciated. Of course, these things go hand-in-hand with other elements, like offering flexibility, fair wages, and compassion to your employees.
Learn from your mistakes.
Chances are, you’ve failed at delivering the best customer experience in the past — and probably more than once. Instead of ignoring those failures, write them down. Then, brainstorm ways that you can do better. Don’t get overwhelmed looking at the mistakes, but use them as a launching point to determine what to do next.
Launch simple ways for customers to help themselves.
Many customers would prefer to complete a purchase without having to interact with a customer service department at all — and businesses can help by implementing simple changes to help customers before they get to that point. Create an FAQ page for your website. Place helpful signs in the stores. Design a helpful guide or online help centre for using your product. Customers would often much rather quickly find an answer online then have to wait for a response to an email or sit on the phone.
Start a customer survey.
How well do you know your customers? How good is that customer experience already? Businesses can get a jump start on building a better customer experience by both understanding the customer, and pinpointing where the current level of customer satisfaction is at. Offer a discount for customers that complete a survey — include the survey or link with the receipt, share it on social media, and send it out in those email newsletters. By getting to know your customers and what they aren’t happy with, you can pinpoint the actions that are going to make the most impact on your business.
Place your goals in a spot that’s easy to see and schedule regular time to work on customer experience.
Sometimes, building customer experience is just a matter of making the time to do so. Start by identifying your goals, then display them in a prominent spot in your office as a regular reminder. Then, schedule time to work on customer experience. Whether that’s daily, weekly or monthly, setting aside some time to brainstorm, work on integrating new options, and more will help the gargantuan task of building customer experience seem much easier to tackle.