Customer service in 5 steps

Did you know that acquiring a new client can be up to 25 times more expensive than maintaining an existing one¹? Unfortunately, many companies fail to provide quality customer service, resulting in preventable losses. Therefore, you should take a look at 5 customer service tips and minimize the risk of losing clients.

1. Terms and Conditions

Terms and conditions are an extremely important part of a website, because very often consumers check a company’s terms and conditions and privacy policy before using its product or service. If you don’t have them or if their record is confusing, they will certainly choose your competitors. What criteria should the terms and conditions meet? Above all, it has to be written in clear language. The terms and conditions should contain, among others, the seller’s data, information about the products or services sold, payment methods, delivery costs and information on making complaints, exchanging goods or returning them. It is this last point that buyers are most often looking for. Research shows that 67% of consumers read the return policy before making a purchase².

2. Quality of customer service – quick response

The quality of service is largely determined by how quickly customers’ problems are resolved. Therefore, do not let the customer have to wait for your response. For this purpose, consider introducing live chat, which will speed up contact and reduce costs associated with customer service. Unfortunately, dissatisfied clients often decide to write publicly about their experiences with the company, as they were sent from one consultant to another, which made them lose time and nerves. Responding quickly and appropriately, as well as resolving the issue, can keep the client coming back to your company more than once. The clients know that there are people on the other side too, who sometimes make mistakes. However, it is important to learn from them and implement changes in the functioning of the entire customer service, so that embarrassing situations occur as rarely as possible.

3. Contact with the client – personalization

The customer service level is positively influenced by the personalization of communication with the client. In this tip, the idea is to pay attention to the customer’s needs regardless of the situation. Therefore, when a client privately or publicly complains about your company, don’t send him a template answer, but refer to this specific situation. Personalization is not about using a person’s name or nickname. It’s all about listening to the client’s problems and expectations. Show buyers that you care about resolving the situation, so you can rebuild trust that has been damaged due to certain factors.

4. Magic words: sorry, please, thank you

But there’s more to service than just responding quickly and personalizing messages. It is also important to include the words sorry, please, and thank you in your communication with clients. Every time a dissatisfied client contacts you, apologize for the situation. Even if you’re not entirely to blame, try to defuse the situation from the start and show that you’re trying to reach an agreement. Sometimes the word please is also useful, especially when solving the problem requires waiting and patience on the customer’s part. You should also thank both satisfied and dissatisfied customers for their feedback. This will show them that you care about their opinion as you are constantly striving to improve your offering as well as the customer experience.

5. Customer service tools

Good customer service doesn’t end with service department phone calls and emails. In daily contact with buyers, it is also worth using the aforementioned live chat. An interesting solution are also chat bots, for example BOTWISE.io, which in contrast to other chat bots does not require time-consuming design of scenarios and prediction of users’ reactions. The artificial intelligence analyzes the documents and files added to the app and matches their snippets with the content of questions asked, which greatly automates response time.

Your brand should also be present on social media, review sites, and anywhere else there may be feedback about it. Brand24 can help you track mentions of your brand. Take care of the feedback from customers. For this purpose, send them invitations to give feedback. Remember to respond to them. You can also send discount codes that will encourage customers to share comments about your company. Rating Captain will help you in obtaining reviews, as well as analyzing them for possible obstacles in the customer’s path.

Summary

Professional customer service should be one of the basic elements of every company’s strategy. It is through quality service that a brand gains the customer’s trust and also learns about their needs by building a relationship with them. The customer service process consists of several elements, and the best results can be achieved by constantly improving each of them.

1 https://hbr.org/2014/10/the-value-of-keeping-the-right-customers

2 https://www.invespcro.com/blog/ecommerce-product-return-rate-statistics/