The Ultimate Customer Service Cheat Sheet
- Be Available. The more channels of communication you offer your clients and potential clients, the more competitive you are in your field. Provide timely responses via the communication channels that your clients and potential clients prefer to use. Read more about those channels here.
- Don’t sell yourself short. Cheap is not always better! Especially when you are in the service industry. If you are an expert in your industry, then you will not need to sell your work with gimmicks; let your work speak for itself and stand by your worth. Taking pride in what you do, the services you provide and the products you offer is an important first step to building business relationships that are built on mutual respect.
- Give back to the community and the office. As a business owner, the responsibility is yours to develop relationships with the communities you service and with the people you employ. Providing great customer service starts with you. How can your business claim to provide top-notch customer care, if you don’t care enough to be supportive of your team members and the community? You can read more about what my colleague has to say about the relationship between community involvement and customer service here.
- Offer a variety of valued-added services, but don’t force them all on your clients. It’s nice to have a great selection of value-added services, but stick to your specialty and give your potential partners the option to utilize the services that they want to use without forcing them to use the ones that they don’t.
- Go social. Your partners and clients will be talking about their experience with your business on social media. It is inevitable. Be ready to quickly respond to positive feedback and resolve complaints on social media platforms.
- Don’t settle for being “just a vendor.” Build partnerships with your clients. Partners work together through good and bad weather toward a mutual goal, but vendors are easily replaced.
- Show your partners you care. Mistakes can happen with any business transaction; it’s how you respond to these instances that makes the difference. Listen until you fully understand, help and resolve without passing the buck, reward and thank your partners for giving you the opportunity to learn together and make things right.
- Be transparent. Wherever you can, offer access to every detail of your partners’ transactions, reports, etc. If you are providing quality services, or goods, and top notch customer service, you will not be sorry for being as forthcoming as possible.
- Know when to outsource. Don’t fall behind the competition. If your competition is raising the customer service bar, it is best to jump in straight away and raise it again. It does not take monumental resources to add channels of communication – it just takes due diligence. Find a partner who shares in your customer service vision and open every door available.
- Envision customer service as a culture. If you haven’t identified and incorporated the triple bottom line for your business, get on it! It is your company’s road map to establishing and sustaining great customer service culture. Here is ours:Vision: AnswerFirst envisions a healthy World filled with happy people enjoying exceptional customer care.
Mission: To ensure employee, client and shareholder success through sound economic, social and environmental policies, resulting in global growth.
Values: Above all we value integrity, respect, accountability and diversity.
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