10 Tips for Better Customer Service! Find out how to improve customer service!

1. Listen!

To help your customers you will need to listen to them carefully. Take the time to understand customer questions. Only when you fully understand the question or problem can you fully answer it. It will also help you better understand future customer questions. In addition, if you really listen to customers, you can avoid the questions at the front end. To do that, though, you need to know exactly what your customers are contacting you about.

2. Accessibility!

Tips for Better Customer Service cannot be done without naming a vexing point: Reachability. Nobody has time these days, especially not to stand on hold for a long time at a customer service desk. Make sure you have visibility into numbers such as wait times, abandonment, ring times etc etc. Analyze those numbers and see where you can do better. Don't have the people, resources or systems in your own customer service department to optimize your customer service? Then consider outsourcing. This allows you to increase your accessibility, opening hours and response time quite easily and often inexpensively.

3. Invest in employees!

Well-trained, satisfied employees make for better customer service. Make sure your employees have the tools to speak to customers. Tools in terms of capacity (training and skill), systems, knowledge and motivation. All important to ensure that your employee can speak to customers cleanly.

4. Make it personal!

A personalized approach makes the customer experience a lot more positive. In doing so, make sure your approach matches your target audience. It makes quite a difference whether you are dealing with older or younger people, for example. Both in we approach (you/you or you) and in the channels you support.

5. Problems? Be honest about it!

Trust is created by communicating honestly, even when there are problems. If you are honest with your customers about any problems or mistakes and then try to solve them in a decent way, there will be understanding. There is less or none when you don't keep your agreements or solve problems.

 6. Provide accessibility 2!

Besides answering customer questions quickly, it is important to be available on the channels your target audience likes to use. In addition, you need to make sure you adapt your opening hours to the lives of your customers. Do you have a webshop? Chances are that the majority of your visitors and orders are in the evening. It is a good idea to make sure you are available then. Read a blog here with everything you need to know about customer service as an online shop! Are your customers mainly elderly? Then you need to be reachable by phone. So reachability through the right channels and at the right times is very important.

7. Call your customers occasionally for better customer service

Many companies never do it, yet it is valuable. It doesn't necessarily have to be a sales moment. Warm welcome calls for example, welcoming a new customer by phone and asking him if there are any uncertainties. That if there are questions that the customer can contact and possibly take him by the hand in a registration process. Calling a customer if there is a late payment to find out what went wrong and if there might be something wrong. That's much more personal than an email payment reminder, isn't it?

8. Ongoing customer feedback:

Use customer feedback on an ongoing basis to further align your services with customer needs. Ask your customers for feedback and not as we increasingly see: Asking your customers to please give you an 8 or a 9. That has nothing to do with customer feedback. Real customer feedback is honest and is particularly about asking why? Why do we get a 6 and what can we do better. Do that on an ongoing basis and you have a mega powerful tool to continuously work on more customer-centric business processes.

9. Ask for help from time to time!

It is sometimes very valuable to have someone else with customer service experience look in. An outside consultant often has a quick grasp of processes and can look at anything without corporate blindness. This often provides surprisingly quick results and insights that are not seen internally. A quick scan of customer service can give you clues that you can work on yourself.

10. Can't do it? Outsource it (partially)!

Running a customer service department effectively, efficiently and professionally is a skill in itself. For most organizations, however, it is something that comes with the territory and is certainly not their core business. For facilities contact centers like it is. We do nothing but set up and take care of customer service. Thereby, outsourcing has a lot of advantages (read them here) and worldwide the majority of all companies do some form of outsourcing (read them here). Looking to see if outsourcing is right for your business? Get in touch.

10 Tips for Better Customer Service! In a nutshell

In short: Tips for Better Customer Service are mostly about aligning your internal organization with the needs of your customers. If that fails, it may be useful to use external help to improve or (partially) outsource customer service in the process.