How to deliver excellent customer service?

For retaining existing customers and getting more value from them, customer service is vital. More importantly, service begins the second a person even begins to consider buying from you, not after they already did. Depending on my customers and the product I sell, I make use of different tactics. However, the following four ways are always in my to-do list in my attempt to deliver excellent customer service:

1) Be affable:

Be friendly with your customers, but at the same time, there is a minor line of separation between being friendly and supplicating. Don’t mix them up. Like, it’s good to ask your customers about their well being, being humorous with them, but you have to be firm on certain things if you think tolerating them will decrease your chance of a sale, or lead the customer down a more difficult path that will lead to them getting frustrated. Be bold in offering them recommendations. Stay cool in the situations when they become angry due to the underperformance of a product or service offered by you. Have explanations for why certain things happened or why they need to do something but do not phrase them as excuses.

2) Quick responsiveness:

Especially when something is time-sensitive, be quick in responding to customers. Pretty self explanatory.

3) Know your customers:

You must be aware of the nature of your customers, their psychology, and interact with them after knowing their needs and wants. Well, that’s not something hard to achieve, once you’ve been in the same business for a little while. Before concluding this answer, I will give you a hint to deal with the common behaviors of customers.

4) Have a fast-help dollar limit:

I learned this from the 4-Hour Work Week. If you have a sizable business and deal with customer service matters in bulk, you need to quicken your turnover of customers who have simpler issues and focus your time on customers with bigger problems. To do this, establish a dollar amount for fast help.

For instance, let’s say you run a community website, and setting up a new account is slightly complicated. Now, let’s say when a customer is confused about setting up their account, doing it for the costs your business about 20 dollars. You know these situations will happen sometimes, and if you let each one pass up into higher levels of management for review, it would only cost more money. So instead, if ever a customer has a simple option that is both A: what they want, and B: costs less than 20 dollars (or whatever your limit is), you instruct your customer support team to always allow that option. That means most customers with basic problems get their problem fixed fast, at minimum cost to you.

By implementing the above ways by modifying them a bit for each situation you get into, anyone can be successful in delivering excellent customer service. Ideally, anyone who is into customer service tries his best to serve customers just as well as they were served in the sales process.

Since we are discussing customer experience, to give service, you need to build a base of customers who are also most likely to enjoy your products and less likely to ever have customer support issues. For that, I would also like to share a special tactic that I follow for building a good customer base. Obviously that’s what sales are. But, getting sales of top-quality customers is not so easy.

I have discovered that there are five common objections customers have toward sales. Understanding those objections, implementing their solutions, and then approaching the customers is a sort of my key to success in making sales and delivering memorable customer service. The way I see it, great customer service starts at serving the bets customers for you, which means getting people to buy in full confidence, addressing all their concerns.  Once any salesperson or customer service agent knows this stuff, his professional challenges are drastically reduced.

As an initiative to help other people who are into dealing with customers, I have made a post: 5 Deep-Seated Customer Doubts That Kill Your Sales (And How to Erase Them). That post covers five common sales objections, their solutions, as well as points to tackle customers in a better way.

In conclusion, customer service skills come by experience and a bit of practice after learning new points. In short, you can learn them with a little effort. The above notes should help a lot.

Good Luck!

Thanks,

Cleo