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.

Earning and retaining customers

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)