There are many key factors that build the foundation for any business to prosper. Good customer service is one of them. Before we dive into the ways of providing great customer service, let’s define what is good customer service.
Defining Good Customer Service
Good customer service is the concept of taking care of your customers so they are happy with your products or services. By definition, good customer service refers to a timely and attentive service given to a customer, ensuring that the customer’s needs are met to create a positive impact on the business.
Why is Good Customer Service Important for Your Business?
The customer service of any company is the most important factor that determines the comfort level of its customers. Customers need support service before, during, and after their purchase. No matter how good your sales funnel is, if there is no good customer service at the point of purchase, customers could back off at the checkout page (or at the cashier in case of a retail outlet). More so, if post-purchase support is not up to the mark, you won’t be able to retain your existing customers. Not being able to get repeat purchases from your customers is not good for your brand loyalty.
If you want to extract true value from every customer you get, then you really need to focus on the quality of your customer support. Many businesses conduct competitor analysis and get ahead of competitor companies that are larger than them, merely because of their best customer service. Strategies like referral marketing and affiliate marketing only work if the seller offers great customer service.
So what is great customer service?
How to Provide Good Customer Service?
There are many ways for a company to provide good customer service. Let’s look into 8 of them.
1. Maintain a Friendly Attitude
The most critical part of providing good customer support is to keep a friendly attitude towards all customers at all times. Greet them with a smile, be courteous towards them, and proactively seek ways to solve their queries and offer help. Customers like empathy and friendliness. They don’t want to feel like they are being pushed or forced to make a purchase. They want to feel that you care about them and can resolve any issues that they may face. Many times, a customer would appear angry or disappointed in you, but in order to provide good customer service, you must remain calm and deal with them respectfully.
2. Always Respond Promptly
Another way to provide good customer service is to respond to your customers’ queries as soon as possible. Customers appreciate prompt responses, and they can easily get distracted or back off from their buying decision if their questions are not answered fast. Good customer service is that in which you don’t keep your customers waiting to get a response from you when they contact you with a query. All emails received by customer support should be returned within 24 hours for the best customer service.
3. Know Your Product Well
To offer great customer service, you need to be well-equipped with knowledge about your products and offerings. You need to know every aspect of what you’re providing to your customer. If you don’t, then you won’t be able to answer their questions promptly. You also need to be able to troubleshoot anything about the service that you offer in a timely manner. You can only do that if you know about your service very well.
4. Listen Carefully to Your Customers
Sometimes, customers are not really asking you a question. They just want you to hear them out. If you sense that a customer is coming from that place in mind, make sure that you make them feel heard. Show them empathy, while at the same time gather information on what they’re really looking for. By listening to your customers attentively, and by relating to them, you can figure out why your product is not doing well and what you can do to improve your sales. This is a major benefit of providing good customer service.
5. Get to Know Them More
The best customer service is one where a business doesn’t limit its interactions with the customers to the inquiries coming in. They take extra steps to get to know their customers better. One way of doing this is to have an active Facebook page or group for your company, where you share regular updates about your products and services. Another way is to conduct surveys to get real-time feedback from your existing and potential customers. These tactics, when performed collectively, form good customer service behavior.
6. Ask for Their Feedback
It is always better to ask for feedback than to expect it to come to you automatically. Customers may or may not tell you on their own whether or not they like the product that they bought from you. But if you ask them, they would usually give you their honest opinion and feedback. By using their feedback, and applying the solutions that you derive from it, you can continue to offer good customer service.
7. Keep Your Commitments
A good customer service is that in which the seller always provides what it commits to provide. Your customers should receive everything that your sales offer says. Putting up with your commitments will help you to build sustainable relationships with your customers. Customers usually remember what you commit to in your marketing content and inbound marketing, and expect to get all of that when they buy from you. If they don’t get what they expect, they will end up disappointed. And what is good customer service? It’s you making sure that your customers are satisfied.
8. Follow up With Your Customers Regularly
If you want your customers to blend in with corporate branding, you must follow up with your existing customers on a regular basis. When a customer buys from you, make sure you have the means to check with them at a later date and ask how their experience with your product has been. Companies that offer great customer service always take out the time to connect with their customers. Don’t just keep silent after they make their first purchase. Build a relationship with them so that they keep coming back to you. Remind them of what more you have to offer. If you do that, your customers would acknowledge that you provide good customer service.
How Can a Website Owner Offer Good Customer Service?
If you run a website, it’s important to build great customer service mechanisms on your site. Websites can offer good customer service in one or more of the following ways.
1. Provide Email Support
Do mention an email address on your site where customers can drop you an email if they want to get in touch.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
2. Build a Contact Form
Many websites use a contact form for customers to fill out if they want to ask you anything. Sometimes, this contact form is part of the site’s e-ticketing system. This is a good way of offering customer support. When a customer fills out the form or opens up an e-ticket, they are sent an instant auto-response, telling them that their message has been received and that they will be responded to shortly.
If you build a site in Strikingly, you can add a contact form to your site which your customers can fill out and ask you anything in it. If you build a site in Strikingly, you will also be able to add a contact form to your site, so that your customers can contact you easily through it.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
3. Provide Phone Call Support
It is always better to let your customers speak to you or your staff than to just let them communicate with you in writing. Best customer service providing companies have a toll-free number where customers can call, and speak to their support staff at any time during the day.
Speaking to your customers on call is good for building a relationship with them. Customers are likely to continue buying from you if they feel heard. They need to know that there’s someone they can contact if they face any issues in using your service.
4. Build a Help Centre
This refers to a community where your customers can ask questions and get answers from you. This is similar to creating an FAQ page for your site. This helps because new visitors having the same queries in mind can find their answers easily.
At Strikingly, we have a help centre that helps our customers understand our website-building tool and its features better. You can search for any inquiry that you have and find a ready-made answer to it. That way you don’t have to wait for our response to get your answers. The help center is already full of tutorials and FAQs that you can read through to learn about our website builder.
Image taken from Strikingly
5. Ask for Product Reviews
Giving customers the opportunity to write product reviews or testimonials on your site is another good way to offer good customer service. This is because new users/customers feel more comfortable using your service when they see that your existing customers are satisfied. It builds a good repo for your brand.
6. Install Live Chat Support
The best customer service mechanism for a website is to offer live chat support to all visitors of your site. The most awesome thing about live chat support is that it enables you to respond to your customers instantly. It is faster and more efficient than email and phone call support. An example of live chat support for good customer service can be seen on the Strikingly website.
Image taken from Strikingly
At Strikingly, we believe that our customers come first. We offer 24/7 live chat support on our site. Whether you are already our customer, planning to become one, or simply visiting our site to check out our offers, we serve you with our best customer service by answering any inquiries you may have through our site’s chat feature.
Image taken from Strikingly
If you build a website in Strikingly, you can also add our live chat feature, which will enable you to provide the best customer service to your site’s visitors. This will really help you in retaining your customers by building a relationship with them. It will also give you an edge over all those competitors that rely solely on email or phone call support, which are slightly less efficient ways of offering good customer service.
If you are interested in building a website in Strikingly, you can sign up for your free Strikingly account today. It is a fun experience to publish your site in just a few hours and manage it all on your own. At Strikingly, we tend to empower our users with all the features they need. But at the same time, we always have your back in the form of good customer service.
