Looking to Retain Customers? Invest in Superior Customer Service

It shouldn’t be that way. Customer service should never be an add-on or afterthought to take care of customers who need more than a sheet of paper printed in several languages. It should be a key part of your business and emphasized as a responsibility to your customers.

Hire Professionals to Deliver Customer Services

There are two huge mistakes businesses often do in a half-hearted attempt to provide customer service:

1. Dump it on newer, younger, or inexperienced staff.
2. Wing it and provide as needed.

The truth is, many employees and businesses just don’t like the idea of customer service. This is a huge mistake. Customer service isn’t something to be avoided but rather recognized as part of doing business. Employers who treat customer service like dirty laundry or make it the least desirable position are hurting themselves because today’s consumers have a lot of choices about where to spend their money. One bad experience will drive them away.

“But all my staff are trained to provide customer service,” you may insist. Fine, but do you really want employees working on production or shipping deadlines to drop everything when there’s a consumer problem? Or do you want a professional to take charge and make your business a pleasure to deal with? Once it’s more than a few emails or phone calls a day, it’s time to hire dedicated staff, notes Alley Watch, a news service for New York-area entrepreneurs.

Get a Customer Service Solution That Works for Your Customers

The solution, many experts say, is to hire dedicated customer service staff. They can devise solutions that work for your specific customers. For example, modern consumers value their time, so customer service delivered online through chats are valuable and particularly appealing to Millennials, suggests Forbes. Or outsource to professional customer service providers. Today’s contact centers, which provide these services, “are righting mistakes of the past,” says Entrepreneur, which notes that they offer several ways customers can reach them, including:

• Website chat agents.
• Interactive voice response (IVR) phone lines.
• Automated callbacks.
• Sophisticated call routing that ensures timely responses to callers.
• Email management.

Analyze your customer service requests so far. Did they call, text, email or contact you on Facebook? Good providers will create solutions that focus resources where they are needed most and have agents who can work on multiple platforms, including mobile.

There’s a ROI in Customer Service

Investing in customer service will bring an ROI (return on investment) in several ways. For starters, good customer service is strongly associated with customer loyalty, according to a report conducted for Oracle that looked at 273 U.S. and British companies with various levels of customer service expertise. U.S. firms with experienced customer service enjoyed:

• A 16 percent competitive advantage.
• An 18-point loyalty advantage.
• Up to 10 percent more chances to earn customer recommendations.
• Less “churn” (abandoning the business for a competitor).

U.S. companies can earn back “hundreds of millions of dollars” with modest investments into customer service, according to the report. Retailers were the second largest beneficiaries of good customer service, just behind fast-food chains in terms of additional purchasing, lower churn, and new business from customer recommendations.

Entrepreneur recommends that in addition to ROI, business owners should do a risk benefit analysis when considering a professional solution for customer service. For example, do you know if late or poor customer service cost you a sale or return customer? Are all your staff good at providing customer service or do they do it because they’re told to? (Sometimes, we should just let accountants do accounting).

And finally, are staff stressed out by the demands of customer service, particularly during busy seasons? Stressed staff do not make good customer-facing decisions.