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)