5 Ways To Improve Your Customer Service
By Kyle McCabe | January 26, 2010
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In an economic drought, good customer service is digging for water. You have to work at it and be smart about it, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. Here are a few things you can do right now to improve your customer service.
1. Listen to your customers
Listen to their complaints. Listen to their problems and their solutions. Listen to their successes and failures, their goals and plans, hopes and dreams; their boring and crazy stories. But don’t just be passive. Ask your customers to talk!
These are the people you need, and who need you. They are the lifeblood of your business, and they are your community. Get to know them, build relationships. Build trust. It starts with listening. Share their excitement, but be quick to root out and squash the causes of their frustrations.
2. Listen to your colleagues
The employee is every bit as important as the customer. An employee can make or break a sale; can gain the trust and loyalty of a customer, or lose it forever.
Listening does not just mean hearing sounds; it’s not passive. It means comprehending, it means dialogue. It means suppressing the ego, looking for the causes of problems, and solving them.
If you are a business owner, your staff represents YOU to your customers, but they also represent your customers to you. Better pay attention. If you work for someone, listen to your co-workers in the same way. This builds trust and shapes a cohesive unit, leading to better customer service.
3. Be open to change
Listening is good, because it allows excitement to be shared and also the burden of frustrations. But understanding the things you hear is one thing – acting on them is another. What created the excitement? Can we try to create more of this? What caused the frustration? How can we avoid more of this?
Change is hard. But it happens with or without you. Your customers and employees, both, will expect poor situations to be fixed. If it doesn’t happen they will no longer be yours.
4. Follow through
Do what you say you’re going to do. I absolutely hate it when people don’t follow through, all the more so because I’ve failed in this area so many times. But it’s as critical as it is fundamental; if you say you will provide a service, then do so. If you say “we provide quality customer service,” or “service you can depend on,” well dammit you’d better deliver.
The corollary to this, of course, is don’t tell me you’re going to do something if you don’t know for sure if you can. A little open communication goes a long way.
5. Strive for consistency
Say you go to a restaurant where you absolutely love the food, but are disappointed by poor quality. How likely are you to return? How likely are you to say to others, “yeah, this place is going downhill”?
Maintaining consistent quality of product or service is difficult. There are many variables, but remember you’re not in this alone. Your customers will tell you if you’re slipping, and so will your employees. Take care of points 1 and 2, and you’ll stand a much better chance of staying on top of this one. But also remember consistency has to apply to all the above points.
Good customer service takes unceasing effort. Maybe that’s why so many businesses don’t have it, or don’t have it consistently. But does any of this stuff work? Is it worth the effort? Am I full of crap?
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Photo courtesy of Tonamel
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