Once your business has customers it’s important to have a customer services department that can handle them – their enquiries, queries and complaints. But there’s a lot to do to ensure it works effectively, helps retain your customers, and allows your business to improve.
So how do you set up a customer services department for your business? We show you the key things to think about.
Defining your customer service
When setting up a customer services department, the first thing you should do is define what it will mean for your business. For instance, what does it aim to do and provide your customers? Will it focus on speed, or will it be more concerned with integrity and quality, when handling enquires and queries? And what standards does it aim to achieve? These can be standards that you can use as a benchmark to measure the department’s performance.
You should also consider how you will handle customers. For instance, what will be your response time, what tone will you use, how will you resolve complaints, and how will you aim to continuously improve your customers experience? It’s also important to think about what ethical guidelines you’ll stick to, and what legal requirements you should follow, depending on your industry.
Deciding on what support channels you’ll use
You should also think about what channels you will use to support and communicate with customers, such as email, phone and LiveChat. Different channels can be better for some services and audiences than others. LiveChat, for instance, which is like a mixture email and phone, can be good for handling queries about retail products. Whereas, taking calls over the phone tends to be better for older audiences, who might be less comfortable with communicating online.
There are other channels to also consider for your customer services department, such as social media and forums, with each having their pros and cons. For instance, social media can be good for facilitating conversation around your product, but people can expect an immediate response on such a public platform. Whereas, forums can allow your community of customers to help each other out, but they require continuous monitoring to prevent issues like trolling.
Building your customer services team
Employing an individual or a small team to manage and run your customer service department is crucial to ensure it’s fully effective. As your customer base grows, the more people there are to ask questions, make queries or have a complaint. Handling such customers can take a lot of work and time and is difficult to do on your own, especially if you have little experience. So it’s better to hire the right people to take this work off your hands.
When hiring someone, you should think about people who have the right customer service skills. This includes a level of patience, alongside skills in clear communication, the ability to persuade people and the ability to adapt to different situations. You should also think about those with good time management and problem solving skills.
Selecting the right tools
It’s also important to have the right tools and technology when setting up your customer services department. This can make life easier for both your employees and your customers. It can have a big impact on your productivity, while guaranteeing those things that you might be striving for, like quality and speed.
Tools could include a customer relationship management (CRM) system allowing you to manage and analyse your customer interactions. Or it could involve a call back service, allowing to keep on top of enquiries and meet your response times. You should also have software to help measure the performance of your department, looking at things like call rates and call lengths, as well as customer and employee feedback. Doing this can help you to keep your department running successfully, while making changes to continue to improve it.
Providing your business with effective customer service
Having an effective customer services department that can handle and resolve customer enquiries, while retaining and acquiring customers, is a crucial part of keeping your business running smoothly. But setting one up can take time and effort and a lot of work to train up staff to a suitable standard. This where Bamboo can help.
We provide a support service that means we can help take care of your customers for you. Our exceptional customer service team do the hard work so you don’t have to, ensuring your customers keep coming back. To learn more about this service, please see our customer support page or contact us to talk to a member of our team. Alternatively, you can request a free 30-day trial to experience our customer support services for yourself and see how it can help your business.
SOURCES (not for publication)
https://www.helpscout.net/helpu/customer-support-department/
http://www.ameyoemerge.in/blog/5-steps-for-small-businesses-to-set-up-a-customer-service-department-from-scratch
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/create-customer-service-department-scratch-39542.html
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/set-up-customer-service-department-2053.html
As a business grows and becomes busier, there are an increasing number of tasks that can take you away from the running of your business and delivering quality services to customers.
One by-product of growth is an increased number of phone calls from your partners, suppliers and customers. Responding to calls can consume a lot of your time and prevent you from working on the rest of your business. Call handling can help to free you back up to concentrate on the rest of your business, but how else could call handling help?
Faster Responses
As a business owner, particularly a sole trader, it can be difficult to balance your workload against an ever-increasing number of phone calls.
You obviously need to respond to people getting in touch with your business, but, in high volumes, the time and attention required can begin to detract from other areas of your business.
Ignoring calls can be problematic, leading to frustrated suppliers, partners and customers. At the same time, one person trying to field lots of calls from different places might mean people are equally frustrated. They might have to be told the line is busy or be left waiting for a response to their answering machine message.
Using a call handling team means there are people dedicated to fielding your phone calls. This helps to ensure that you aren’t missing important messages and that your customers can get through to your business.
Improved Efficiency
As a sole trader, fielding lots of phone calls can stop you from working on day to day tasks for paying customers. This can mean that jobs take longer to complete and that you aren’t working as efficiently as you could be doing.
Call handling deals with calls on your behalf allowing you to work more efficiently. This lets you focus on the work that your business is built around. However, you should make sure you are still reachable just in case you are needed on short notice. This could be in situations such as dealing with a customer complaint or having to deal directly with a supplier over a stock issue, for example.
Handing over your call handling to someone else means you can assign time to respond to people and organise your day in a more structured manner.
The benefit of this is that you provide a timeframe for people to get in touch with you or a window of time where you can respond to queries personally. This also means that you can plan your day more efficiently, focussing on paying client work for the majority of your time.
How can Bamboo support your business?
Organising your time when trying to run a business is crucial. Prioritising the wrong thing and giving too much attention to one area of your business is often detrimental to the others.
Call handling can take the strain out of constant phone calls and distractions, allowing you to concentrate on other areas of your business.
Training and putting a team in place to handle your calls might sound expensive and time consuming. This is where Bamboo can help.
We provide call handling services that mean we can talk to your customers and partners on your behalf. We ensure you don’t miss any important business calls and provide a better quality of service to your customers, giving you back the time to focus on the rest of your business. To learn more about this service, please see our call handling page or contact us to talk to a member of our team. Alternatively, you can request a free 14-day trial to experience our call handling services for yourself and see how it can help your business.
SOURCES (not for publication)
As a business owner, you might feel like there’s a lot of moving parts to running your business effectively.
Sometimes this can feel like there’s almost too much to handle. You might feel that ignoring an aspect of your business that you aren’t particularly savvy or confident in gives you more room to focus on those you are more comfortable with. This can lead to major problems further down the line.
Thankfully, even though you run the business, you don’t have to handle your operations alone. There are a range of different opportunities and avenues for support that business owners can take.
Financial
Your focus might be entirely on the day to day operations of your business. For example, as a tradesman, you might be on site every day focussing on delivering a quality job to your clients. After a long day at work, it can be difficult to find the time or energy to sit and handle your business finances effectively.
Enlisting help from a third party — either handling taxes through an accountant or general bookkeeping services helping to keep your finances organised — can be a huge strain lifted from a business owner.
This helps to ensure that everything is kept as accurate and properly recorded as possible. In turn, this gives you extra time and energy to focus on the areas of your business you are more actively engaged with.
Human resources
If you have staff, even just a small team, you still need to take steps to ensure their rights as employees are maintained and you fulfil your role as an employer.
Having access to human resources support can help your business to cover a range of areas, including:
- Contracts
- Disciplinary procedures
- Grievance procedures
- Hiring and firing
These are important aspects to running any business, regardless of size. These various processes often involve a range of documentation or run the risk of leading to expensive legal issues if carried out incorrectly. Getting the help you need can ultimately enable your business to run much more effectively.
Customer services
As a business, you might find that you struggle to deal with queries and issues from customers while still being able to meet deadlines and deliver a quality service.
Putting a full customer service team in place can be incredibly expensive, with equipment, hiring, training and set-up costs all piling up.
Enlisting a third party can help to alleviate some of the stress. For example, they could handle phone calls and respond to queries on your behalf. This means you will only need to get involved if there’s an issue that needs your assistance, which, in turn, gives you more time to focus on other aspects of your business.
The added benefit of a customer service team is that it helps you improve efficiency. You have other people to rely upon, which will help you offer a more professional service experience to your customers.
Providing your business with the right support
There are a lot of different aspects to running a business, and keeping on top of all of them can be difficult.
From deciding which services you need to prioritise, to being able to quickly get the services you need in place, Bamboo can help.
We provide a range of support services, which means we can help take some of the strain out of running a business, from handling customer service to bookkeeping and HR. To learn more about our services, please see our customer support page or contact us to talk to a member of our team. Alternatively, you can request a free 14-day trial to see for yourself how Bamboo can help your business.
SOURCES (not for publication)
In any business, it’s important to ensure a company’s customers feel they’re receiving a great service. If you can effectively handle customer queries and concerns with professionalism, your customers are likely to think the same of your business too.
Demonstrating consistently effective customer service can really make a company stand out. This article details some of the ways your business can benefit from it.
It’s important that your business can keep customers engaged over time, which can, in turn, lead to them using your services again or more often in the future.
Developing a relationship with both existing and potential customers via your customer service can be a huge benefit to your business. For example, if some potential customers are still undecided about using your services, it might be your exceptional customer service that informs their decision. By conversing with potential customers in a friendly manner, rather than only focussing on earning sales – treating them as people first, customers second – you could earn their custom too.
Once you earn a customer, it can be much easier to keep them with you for the long term. In fact, research shows it costs a business far more to attract a brand new customer than to retain an existing one. So instead of spending money on marketing that attracts new customers, effective customer service can allow you to focus on those customers that want to stick with you. This can encourage them to spend more – whether that’s buying more of your products or using your services more often.
Word of mouth and customer referrals
While effective customer service helps you earn and retain customers directly, those that you do keep can earn you more in the future.
For example, one of your customers might find out that a family member, friend or colleague could benefit from using your services. If they’ve had a positive customer service experience that puts your business ahead of your competitors, which they might have used in the past, your business could be the one they recommend.
This effectively makes your own customers part of your business marketing. Leaving them with a positive impression of your company can encourage them to spread the word, resulting in more people considering using your services.
Bringing more money into your business
Good customer service can help your business become more profitable too. If your own existing customers are helping you bring more into the fold, you’re not spending money trying to acquire them.
As more and more people start to become aware of your business, you’re likely to start earning more sales and providing your services to more customers.
Existing customers also tend to spend more than new customers. So once you’ve impressed them with your professionalism and customer service skills, they can become an increasingly valuable asset to your business.
With an increased cash flow coming into your business, you might have more money available to improve and expand too. Perhaps you could invest in some new equipment, expand your existing services, or hire some staff. Essentially, good customer service can be a useful way to help your business grow and become even more of an attractive prospect to your potential customers.
Helping your business provide the best customer service
Effective customer service can really help a business succeed. However, some sole traders and small businesses might feel like it’s a struggle to provide great customer service, while balancing the smooth running of the rest of their business too.
Bamboo’s customer support services can help by providing your business with an exceptional team to handle all of your customer concerns and queries. This means you can focus your business efforts elsewhere, safe in the knowledge that your customers are receiving an effective and reliable service at all times. Using Bamboo’s services also means you don’t have to worry about hiring extra staff, focussed solely on customer support.
If you’d like to find out more, take a look at our customer support service page. Alternatively, get in touch with us to enquire about a free trial.
The right customer support and service can make a huge difference to a business. From helping you to attract and retain customers, to handling complaints and queries effectively, the right team can provide a business owner with peace of mind that their customers are being well taken care of.
Improving your customer services department can help your business respond to and help a greater number of people, but what should you be mindful of as a business owner when it comes to improving your customer support services?
Increase capacity
One way to improve your customer service provision is to make it larger, allowing you to handle a greater number of calls, emails and enquiries than you would normally be able to.
When you first set up your business, you might have been the sole person responsible for dealing with customers. However, as you’ve grown, more people have been brought on board to take some of the strain of dealing with customers away from you.
Your business shouldn’t stop growing, so expanding your customer service team further should be something you’re mindful of. This could be through permanent additions to the team or outsourcing to help bolster the team during busier periods, such as around specific sales, promotions or seasonal peaks.
Build business understanding
The quality of your customer service improves the more your customer service staff understand your business, its policies and its services.
This can take time to achieve, especially if you also need to train a staff member in how to work within your customer services department.
There are a number of policies and aspects of a business your customer services staff should understand:
- Customer-facing policies – e.g. returns, complaints etc.
- Hierarchy – if you can’t solve a problem, who can?
- Contact information – who else does a customer need to talk to?
The more of this sort of information your staff understand and are aware of, the quicker and more efficient your services should be.
Personalised service
Customers getting in touch with your business want to feel like they are welcome and valued. A personal touch can be a great way to reinforce this and make your customer services team have a more positive impact on customers.
Any query or enquiry should be handled to completion by one person, providing a customer with a point of contact. If they need to be passed onto a different department or a different person to deal with a specific issue, they should get the same sort of treatment.
In smaller teams that tend to deal with larger volumes of calls, this can be difficult to accomplish. Expanding your team or splitting it into specialised departments can help give staff more time to focus on specific customers and problems, improving the overall quality of your service.
Learn from feedback
The best way to improve is to find out what else your customers would benefit from. Get feedback from your customers to find out what you could do differently or do better. This could be through feedback forms or email surveys, for example.
You might find that there are really simple changes you could make, or you might identify an area of weakness to fix that could lead to major improvements in your customer service.
How can Bamboo help with your customer service?
Getting your customer service right allows you to make a great lasting impression on customers that could see them coming back to your business for years to come.
Getting that service right can be difficult, as training and growing a team takes time, effort and resources. From building the understanding of your business to actually getting a professional team in place, Bamboo can help.
We provide a range of support services, which means we can help take some of the strain out of running a business, from handling customer service to bookkeeping and HR. To learn more about our services, please see our customer support page or contact us to talk to a member of our team. Alternatively, you can request a free 14-day trial to see for yourself how Bamboo can help your business.
SOURCES (not for publication)
