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Retaining Customers 101: How Customer Service can Reshape your Small Business
The heart and soul of any business is its customers. It truly doesn’t matter what you’re selling; growing your business depends solely on getting customers and more importantly, keeping them. As a business owner, you might have learnt all the tricks on how to grow your business, but one of the most important tricks is one where businesses are often found lacking, and that is customer service.
What is customer service?
The definition of the term is in the phrase; it means the ‘service’, which in this case stands for assistance and advice provided by a business to a customer who often wants to make an enquiry, a purchase or a complaint. It is a direct interaction between either a potential or returning customer, and a representative of the business.
Let’s run a simple test. You might be a business owner, but you’ve also shopped from or bought something from another business, whether it was online or offline. How often did you go back to a place where you were treated terribly?
We’ll guess. Probably never.
It doesn’t matter how great your products or services are, or how fantastic your prices are. Bad customer service will scare anyone away, as it has probably done to you from other businesses in the past.
How Customer Service can Reshape your Small Business
1. With a great customer service, you can build brand trust, satisfaction and loyalty for your business which helps you create lasting relationships with your customers. Returning customers means:
Increase in total income, while reducing the cost you would have spent having to re-market to them over and over again.
Cheerleaders for your brand. A happy customer will talk about how great your brand’s customer service is.
2. A great customer service also always keeps you ahead of your competitors. Your customer service is typically the first point of contact between a customer and your business, and how a customer views your business from the beginning matters a lot. They never forget how interacting with your business made them feel. Treat them right and when you combine it with all your other marketing tips, you’ll never lose them to a competitor.
3. Customer service can increase sales for your business immediately. A great customer representative can convince a customer on the spot to buy an item, or subscribe to a product, while bad customer service will put the customer off immediately.
4. Customer service is a perfect way to get to know your customers better and improve your services and processes. Feedback from customers who are encouraged by customer service to share can always be used to find flaws in your system, and improve on them to create a better one, which in turn delights your customers even more.
5. Customer service increases the lifespan of any business. As earlier mentioned, your business is nothing without your customers. Customer service is a key strategy in retaining all the customers that your marketing efforts bring in.
See now how customer service can actually be a game-changer for your business?
Tips on How to Retain Customers & Reshape your Business with Customer Service.
Always Lead with Politeness.
Create a warm and welcoming environment for your customer, where they feel like they can talk to you about anything at all. Outright rudeness is not the only thing that can send a customer running; just getting the vibe that a customer service rep isn’t welcoming is enough to discourage a potential customer from continuing a conversation. Always be polite, and also know what to say to an angry customer, or what to not say to an angry customer.
Related: 10 Tips on How to Improve Customer Service for your Small Business
Have a full understanding of your business, product or service.
Because customer service is the first point of contact between your business and a customer, it is absolutely important that there’s a full understanding of your business, product or service by your reps. It is very refreshing and calming to a customer that when they’re not even exactly sure of what they want, a customer service agent can guide them and help them make the best decisions. As a matter of fact, they’ll never forget.
This particular tip also makes you stand out as a knowledgeable business, shows professionalism and convinces the customer that your business knows what it is doing. This is already a good reason for them to spend their money on you.
Invest in Customer Service training.
It is very important to not neglect customer service as a part of your overall business growth plan. If you’re a small business owner that handles your customer service yourself, do not take it that you know everything. Invest in getting better at handling your customers, learn from your mistakes and never forget that there is always room for improvement. If you have a team, create a strategy. Have a unique template that ensures that your reps are saying the right things across board, are maintaining the same tone for the brand and observing the right culture and values for your brand. Make sure to do check-ins with your team, and refine your strategies every step of the way.
Conclusion.
A great customer service is a very integral part of your business. It can be the reason why a potential customer decides to convert or not, and why a customer who already converted can decide to make another purchase or never come back. As you work on improving your product or service, also make sure that you do not neglect that very important aspect of your business. It is an instant game changer.
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