Excellent customer service will make your business stand out. These 17 customer service tips can increase customer satisfaction, build client loyalty, and lead to referrals, recommendations, and more sales.
Providing excellent customer service is one of the most important keys to small business success. Whether your business competes with large national concerns or with local retailers and service providers, exceptional customer service will help you build loyal customers and repeat business. Use the 17 pointers below to wow your customers and keep them coming back.
Why Customer Service Is So Important
Customer service trumps sales, and sales drive your bottom line. Remember, there’s a fine line between driving sales and driving away customers. Always think customer service first, and the sales will follow.
There’s probably no more infamous retail group on the planet than car salespeople. Their skills in selling an automobile that a buyer may not really want or can afford are things of legend. While the dealer’s bottom line looks good today after such a sale, the long-lasting bad taste in the customer’s mind can be devastating and seldom results in good customer relations and repeat business. Repeat customers can be crucial to the small or home business owner.
As maligned as car salespeople have been (rightly or wrongly, since perception rules), my first encounter with good customer relations came about due to a car salesperson.
I remember my father always bought his Buicks from a man named Art. Since both of them were in sales, there was the usual offer, counteroffer, haggling, and seemingly exhausting negotiations over “options.” But when the deal was done, my dad was happy, Art was happy, the dealer was happy, and they shook hands, knowing they would do it all over again in two years.
Friends and family would ask my dad why he went through such an ordeal. Simple, he would say. “On the one hand, Art and I like to play the game, but he respects me and I respect him. We are friends … plus, the customer service I get from the dealer is unbeatable. We always get loaner cars, fast service on repairs, fair prices, and honesty.”
Our family bought cars from Art for 17 years because he knew my dad and he provided sterling customer care. What should you, the small business owner, know about building such a customer relationship?
17 Customer Service Tips That Win Sales
We’ve compiled a recipe for good customer service that may help you in your daily operations. Some of this information you may know, some may be new, but these customer service tips will help you impress your customers and clients and, as a result, lead to more sales, more repeat business, and more customer referrals.
1. Know your product
You can’t provide good service to your customers if you don’t know your product. Customers expect you to be an expert on what you sell and to be able to answer any questions they may have about your products. But you need to know your customers equally well. Stay on top of their needs and concerns. Listen to their suggestions for product improvements. Listen to their gripes about things related to what you sell and offer solutions. If there’s something about your products that dissatisfies customers, fix it.
2. Think like your customers think
Your customers drive your bottom line. Always imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes and think about what they want. Listen to questions and comments from in your store, online in email, reviews. Act to solve complaints and make other improvements. Join online groups your target audience participates in. Read articles or watch videos they talk about. Attend webinars and workshops they attend.
3. Interview individual customers and prospects
Targeting individual customers to interview will likely yield quicker results than creating a general survey posted on your Facebook page. Ask your existing customers if they’d be willing to spend a few minutes answering questions. Consider using social media to find people actively discussing your topic, and ask whether they’d be willing to chat with you.
First, ask broad questions related to your business, and then encourage people to expand on their answers. For instance you might ask “Were you able to find what you needed?” Or, “Were our employees helpful to you?”
Then, use questions like “can you tell me more?”, “can you expand on that?” or a simple “why is that the case?” to encourage the customers or prospect to keep talking. Ask about the amount of time a problem has existed (which may indicate the level of frustration a customer experiences).
People don’t tend to spill everything on the table at once, particularly when chatting with strangers, so using fact-based questions can uncover lots of nuggets of information buried beneath the surface.
4. Don’t try to be everything to everyone
How many times have you seen successful businesses lose their way and stumble or fail because they tried to “expand” only to discover that what made them successful in the first place slipped away. When you lose your customer focus, you lose customers, lose business, and lose on your bottom line. You’ve stopped providing customer service in favor of providing an arena for failure.
5. Commit to quality service
Go above and beyond your customers’ expectations. Your product knowledge will engender confidence and trust and enable you to anticipate their questions, focus on their needs and guide you both to an appropriate solution to their situation. It’s almost impossible to ask too many questions of your customers. Once you know what they want, you will be able to deliver the right product at the right time. In simplest terms: Listen to your customers and go that extra mile. Listening to customers also often enables you to make suggestions about your services and products the customer hasn’t thought about, and they’ll appreciate your knowledge and expertise to help them resolve their needs.
6. Treat people with courtesy and respect
You know how you like to be treated when you’re the customer. We all like to be accorded courtesy and treated as a sensible adult. You never argue with a customer. Even if you know your customer is wrong, resolve the sales question or service issue quickly and in their favor, and you’ve made a friend. Research shows that helping a customer resolve their issue results in continued business and likely makes a customer for life. Repeat business, not to mention word-of-mouth referrals, is the lifeblood of bottom lines
7. First impression truly is important
This axiom needs no amplification. You can’t unring the bell, so do it correctly from the start and good customer service is bound to lead to sales. Do you really need to be told to be pleasant and smile (even if it’s just your voice on the phone) when greeting a customer?
8. No excuses
Delivering on a promise results in a customer delivering you the order. Even though we live in a litigious, red-tape, bureaucratic world, good customer service is as old as a handshake. Your word is your bond so make it mean something. Your customer will appreciate it, and you will appreciate their business.
9. Focus on making customers, not sales
Repeat customers save you money because you don’t always have to reinvent the wheel to get them into your store or to your website. Every new customer comes with costs, whether it’s advertising, marketing, or time spent explaining and describing your products and services. Repeat customers are gifts you give yourself because you provided great customer service right from the start, and your reward is their loyalty and continued patronage.
10. Make your business user-friendly
Whether your business is brick and mortar or a website, make it EASY to navigate and SIMPLE to understand. In a store, make sure you and your staff are helpful, cheerful, and knowledgeable. On a website, get your customers to where they want to go in the fewest clicks possible. Don’t overload them with sidebars and diversions as they push their electronic shopping carts through a morass of “maybe you’d also like” icebergs until their ship sinks and they head elsewhere, where the website waters are calm and easy to cross to that elusive checkout stand.
11. Don’t talk up or down to customers
Customers want you to be proactive, an ATM of information and service. They don’t want to feel they’re trying to communicate with a rocket scientist or a politician.
12. Listen to your customers
Customers want your attention. Whatever their need is, it’s the most important item on their agenda at that particular moment, so treat it accordingly. Listen to what the person on the other side of the table is really telling you. It’s natural to get caught up thinking about what you’re going to say next when nerves take over, but the trouble is that as you formulate that next thought in your head you miss what the other person is saying. And never violate that old axiom that you can’t judge a book by its cover.
Related content: 5 sales mistakes that drive away customers
13. Live customers trump phone calls
We’ve all been to stores where the salesperson is on the phone. Personal calls are the kiss of death, but if you’re on a business call, don’t ignore the live body waiting for you. Let them know you’ll be right with them and if you have to, explain that you were helping a customer and not making a date for coffee after work.
14. Be helpful even if it means sending the customer elsewhere
The 1947 movie “Miracle on 34th Street” contained a great sales and service gem. If you can’t get your customer what they want, offer to help them find it elsewhere. That unselfish gesture will make you stand tall in your customers’ eyes and will have them return next time. In addition, you can bet that they’ll share your generosity with others who will come to you for service and sales.
15. Loose lips sink customers
If you’ve been to a hospital lately, you’ve seen the signs imploring medical staff not to talk about patients. The same applies in business; you don’t talk about other customers. It serves no purpose to talk about others and will make your customer wonder if you talk about them when they leave. Silence about other customers indeed is golden in the retail world.
16. Dot those I’s and cross those T’s
Always check your product or service package before the customer leaves. Give everything a last once-over to make sure it’s all in order. Not only does it demonstrate that you care about your customer, but it often will save grief down the road when service or corrections to an order are required.
17. Followup with the customer
No matter what product or service you’ve sold a customer, you can be assured that they will appreciate it if you follow up in a couple of days to see how it’s working out. And it may lead to further business and more customers when your attention to detail and customer service is passed on by a happy customer.
