You can’t start a business without thinking about customer service. The quality of your company’s customer service can be the difference between finding success and your brand’s complete failure. Even the best product or service in the world needs to be paired with good customer service if you want to grow your business. Fortunately, there are plenty of things you can keep in mind if you want to put a strong focus on the quality of your customer service.
By building a good customer service framework from the very start, you can ensure your brand becomes known for its support and the way it treats its customers. Start off by making the right moves, and the rest can start to fall into place as your business expands.
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Decide Between In-House or Outsourced Support
To start with, you might want to consider what aspects of your customer support to keep in-house and what, if any, you want to outsource. There are pros and cons to both in-house customer support and outsourced customer service. When you outsource your customer service, you can benefit from a full customer support team while also saving money. However, in-house customer service might be more expensive, but it also means that you have full control. Which one is right for your business might not be immediately obvious, so it’s important to give it some careful thought.
Choose Tools with Built-In Customer Service
Your selection of the tools your business will use will be influenced by many factors. But one thing you don’t want to forget about is customer service. Some tools will make it easier to deliver the standard of customer service that you want to display. They can even come with built-in customer service tools that you can extend to your customers. When you’re choosing your courier software, look for an option that allows you to add customer service tools to your website. Your customers will appreciate being able to track their orders and stay up to date with the latest information.
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Know the Law
It’s always crucial to know the law in relation to customer service. Providing legally-required assistance to your customers is the least you can do. When it comes to the law, some of the things you might need to consider include the customer’s right to return or exchange something that they have bought, and their right to a refund. Another element to consider in relation to this is your insurance. It’s important to protect your business from any potential customer issues, including damage that your products or services could cause. Coverage from policies such as public liability insurance will protect you.
Automate Parts of Your Customer Service
There’s no need to carry out every aspect of customer service manually. Customer support is increasingly being automated, which helps to take some of the pressure off your customer service staff. You can use a range of methods to do this, from using a chatbot to offering self-service customer support such as a help center or knowledge center. Automated customer service typically works best for common queries that can easily be resolved with stock answers and prepared information. Your customer service reps can then use their time helping people with more complex problems that need a human touch.
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Set Clear Response Times
Setting response times is something that many businesses might neglect when designing their customer service processes. However, response times can help to keep customer service moving and maintain high standards. Desired response times will differ depending on a number of factors, including your industry and the products or services you offer. How you respond to customers can be different too. It’s important to develop processes for the kinds of responses you want to provide, as well as how long you expect to take to offer a response, whether it’s to an email, phone call, or seeing a customer in person.
Have a Complaints Procedure
Dealing with complaints definitely isn’t the most pleasant part of customer service, but it is necessary. The last thing you want is to have to deal with complaints without any set approach for how to do it. If you don’t have a complaints procedure, things can quickly go terribly wrong. A clear complaints procedure can help you to deal with complaints calmly and sensibly, helping to create an outcome that everyone is happy with.
If you want to get customer service right for your business, build it from the ground up. Keep customer service in mind from the very beginning so that you can make it the shining jewel of your business.
