If you want to ensure the success of your business, you need to provide excellent customer service to your customers and clients.
With more and more boutique companies offering extremely high-quality service, your business must keep pace to remain competitive. It doesn’t matter if your prices are lower or the goods and services you provide are actually better than the competition; if your customer service is shoddy, your sales and customer base will shrink.
Investing in customer service will offer an incredible return. Customers remember when they have outstanding service, and are willing to pay more in order to experience it. Provide it to them, and enjoy increased sales and a better reputation.
Not convinced having a wonderful customer service department pays off? Consider the following:
Future business relies upon service experience
Customers aren’t always right, but when it comes to providing excellent service, it’s a moot point. When customers receive a high level of care and compassion from the companies they purchase from, they remember it; and they return to complete more purchases in the future. Good service ensures you retain your current customer base.
It also helps to guarantee you’ll acquire new customers and add to that base. People talk, and word of mouth is a powerful thing. When you provide stellar service, you’ve also provided a customer with a reason to praise your business and tell all their friends about how wonderful your company is.
Great service may ward off complaints
Although it sounds extreme, customers do have the ability to file formal complaints against your company or even to attempt to take legal action. Even if you think this would be an extraordinary circumstance, it is wise to guard against this possibility.
Regardless, you must still guard against negative reviews in less formal areas, like word of mouth and internet review sites. Providing great service is a smart way to ward off complaints and negative reviews. Even if a customer is dissatisfied with a product, customer service can often help solve their problem.
Instead of having an upset customer become even more upset when they receive average (or worse, below-average) service, your company can instead use a positive customer service experience to have an upset customer come in with a problem but walk out with a solution and having had the pleasant experience of having their issue solved.
Providing a unique experience may present a unique opportunity
If you can provide a unique experience for your customer, you may find that you company is presented with opportunities it might not have otherwise received. Doing something unexpected and fun can garner write-ups on industry sites or consumer blogs. Going above and beyond may result in individuals share their stories with media and news outlets, who then provide your company with free exposure.
Customer service can make or break a company’s reputation
If you are competing with many other businesses in the same industry, and all these other companies provide a very similar good or service, investing in customer service can pay off by bettering your reputation and encouraging potential customers to pick your company over any other.
However, if you fail to invest in your customer service, you will drive customers away. When you’re competing for market shares, you can’t afford to be average. You might have saved money in customer service training, but ultimately you will end up losing customers and sacrificing sales thanks to a bad reputation.
But you can protect yourself against this by simply taking the time and money to invest in good customer service training for your employees. Provide excellent training or have employees take online or in-house courses. This small upfront expense will pay dividends for your company down the road when all your customers love not only what you sell, but your brand as a whole.
