Many small businesses have trouble with customer service, figuring that since they’re a small business, customers will understand. After all, if you’re a small, local business, what does it matter if you keep your customers happy? They’ll still come back anyway.
But that’s an extremely short-sighted point of view. Sure, they may come back, but they won’t be happy about it. And if you don’t keep your customers happy, they won’t be loyal to you either.
If you’re a small business and want to keep growing, having good customer service is one of the most important things you can do. It helps build loyalty to your brand and reputation, it gives your business a competitive edge, and it helps foster customer retention and growth. In this article, RisePath CRM team shares their research on customer service with you.
Significance of Customer Service
Customer service is a powerful differentiator and has become even more important as competition increases. With the same products and services, customers often choose who they buy from based on the customer service experience.
As a small business owner, you may not think that customer service applies to you. After all, you’re probably not a retail store or a call center. When you work with your customers, you get to know them on a personal basis and can focus on their specific needs. This is true, but it’s also important to make sure that your customers feel valued and appreciated. Even if you aren’t making sales calls or working the cash register, it’s important for every person in your company to understand the importance of good customer service.
Customer service is a key part of running a small business. After all, if your goal is to make the customer happy, then you need to be serious about customer service.
If a customer has an issue with your product or service, it’s up to you (or someone on your staff) to resolve the issue. It’s not always easy, but there are steps you can take toward better customer service:
- Make it easy for customers to reach you.
- Be responsive.
- Get feedback from your customers.
- Take complaints seriously and address them immediately.
- Think from the customer’s perspective.
- Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback on social media or in person.
- Use a crm for small business in order to handle issues with your customers.
Why customer service is essential to growing your business?
The most successful businesses are the ones that understand that customer service is important to growing your business. If a company doesn’t know how to attend to its customers, they won’t come back.
How do you think companies like Amazon and Zappos became so successful? It’s because they know how to take care of their customers. They don’t try to pull a fast one on them. They provide great products and services, and they treat their customers with respect.
It’s important to acknowledge that customer service is more than just handling complaints. It’s about treating every interaction as an opportunity to build a better relationship with your customers, even if it isn’t always a positive one.
How you talk to your customers will always be remembered by them. Your tone of voice, and the words you use, will have a lasting impact on how your business is perceived. Even if you’re dealing with an unpleasant situation, your customer should feel like he or she was heard and received the help he or she needed from you.
You can have a great product and amazing marketing, but if your customer service is subpar, you’re going to lose customers. A CRM for small business can help you do a great job of serving your customers efficiently.
Effect of Social Media
In the age of social media, poor customer service is magnified many times over. The old adage is true: You can win more customers with your ears than your mouth.
While the importance of customer service has always been important for the growth of businesses, the rise of social media has made it even more vital. In an online space where everyone can see negative reviews and stories about a company’s poor customer service, it’s imperative that you create a loyal community that wants to support you based on how well you take care of them.
Here are some tips on how to build a great customer service team and how to implement some best practices that will help you delight your customers every time.
They go something like this. The customer is the boss, and your job is to make them happy. You should treat customers as though they were royalty and do whatever it takes to make them feel good.
8 Reasons Why Customer Service Is Important To Growing Your Business
- But first of all, there is a problem. Customers are not always loyal. They are also sometimes cranky, demanding, and annoying. So you can’t really treat them as if they are always nice.
- Second, treating customers well doesn’t mean you have to put up with their bad behavior. If they’re making unreasonable demands or being rude and harassing, you have every right to tell them so directly, and to act accordingly.
- Third, the customer is not always right about the best way to solve their problem. If they are being unreasonable or being rude or harassing, you must make them see that they are thinking along the wrong lines — but in fact, they may not be right at all! They’re basing their demand on some irrelevant emotion or mood that has nothing to do with whether they need what you’ve got or how much it will cost them or how long it takes to deliver. A customer who’s being rude is often simply upset; she needs sympathy more than instruction; she needs help more than an apology; she needs a kind word.
- Customer service is not just a question of how well you handle the customer. It determines if people will come to your company in the first place.
- The better you are at handling the customer, the more valuable you are as a partner with your clients. They like working with you, and when you’re a partner, that means more for them than just getting the job done well.
- People who buy from you will recommend you to their friends.
- If your customer service is bad, your customers won’t recommend you to their friends. So they won’t buy from you either; they will go elsewhere.
- If your customers don’t recommend you to their friends, they won’t get other jobs from those friends either. So they will go elsewhere too.
In order to take care of your customer service needs, consider implementing a CRM for small business like RisePath CRM which will make your customer support operations extremely efficient.
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