Good customer service is the backbone of a successful business. How you treat your customers reflects precisely on your sales, revenue, and reputation. It also shows the skills and manners of the people communicating directly with the customer. That is perceived by the customer as a company value and your business can suffer or gain from it, depending on the nature of it.
What is customer service exactly
Customer service is every element of the communication that your employees have with your customers before, during, and after they purchase your products or services. By communication, we mean the conversations, the way they make the customer feel, the experience, and the quality of the service overall. A big part of customer service is the support you offer to those customers after they have purchased your product or service.
Every business has to pay close attention to the way they are treating their customers. It doesn’t matter how big or small your business is, for it to be successful, you have to build it around the customer. Even though it requires some initial investment in time and money, it is worth it.
How good customer service helps your business
Customer service reflects on your brand image, mission, and values.
Every business has an idea about what their brand stands for. Every brand represents a set of values, be that by the causes they support, the way they build their products, or finally, the way they treat their customers. Your values are broadcasted on your website, advertisement, social media, etc. But the most important way your values are shown off is the experience your customers have when they interact with you.
Since customer service is so important, training your employees to represent your brand as good as possible is key. These people are your customer service team. They are some of the most important people in your organization and the ones you should be working with the most. A great example is Starbucks. They invest a lot of time and effort into training their employees so their customers have the best experience possible when they buy their coffee.
Since customer service is so important for the success of the organization, a great deal of cooperation between the managers and the employees is required. That good relationship will definitely reflect on customer service, which leads to our other point.
A happy employee equals a happy customer
Happy employees reflect positively onto every part of the organization. This is not important only for your customer service employees. A good healthy relationship with their job is guaranteed to reflect positively on the quality of it. Employees do no enjoy coming to work if they feel underappreciated and mistreated.
Since customer service employees are going to interact with your customers, it is important that you create a friendly, trusting, and overall good relationship with them. If the relationship between the manager and the customer service employee is bad, those employees will not care about how they come across at the customers. You also might lose talented employees on the process.
For your employees to do their job the best they can, they need to feel respected and appreciated. Only that way will they find the energy and motivation to do one of the most stressful jobs, dealing with the customers first hand. That way everyone will benefit. You will gain loyal and satisfied customers, your employees will feel fulfilled, and your customers will have a great experience while buying your products or services.
Word spreads
Satisfied customers are very likely to share their positive experienced with their family and friends. This is a simple way to gain new customers by simply offering high-quality services. The quality of the product they bought is not the only determinator of their experience. They will make sure to elaborate on the way they were greeted, to the way they were sent off. Both, a good and bad impression is likely to catch on.
The whole customer experience comes full circle. Your leading skills affect the way your employees feel about their job, and their behavior towards your customers affects the way they feel about your brand. Next, that impression will be shared with their relatives, which are probably your potential customers, and lastly, all of this will reflect on the success of your business.
Customer loyalty
Customer loyalty is something many business owners strive to have. This is basically someone that will keep coming back to you time and time again because they trust your brand. This trust is built, of course, with great products, but also with great customer service. The experience these people have while buying your product will determine if they come back. The more loyal your customers are, the less they are going to buy from your competition. Building customer loyalty means increased profit and higher sales for you.
This is a great chance to develop competitive advantages. This is very important in industries where many companies offer the same product or service. To stand out of the crowd, you have to establish great customer services so that the people buying your products get something extra on their deal. This way they feel like your products or services are different and better than your competitor’s.
Customers are willing to pay more
Good experiences make people come back and buy more. The amount of importance people give to these interactions with the customer service people shows that you’re not only selling them a product. You’re also selling them the interaction the friendliness and a good feeling, and if they don’t get it they won’t come back. Most customers, around 86% of them say they would pay 25% more if it meant they would receive good customer service. This can enable you to raise your prices without losing customers.
In the business world, where it has become harder and harder to stay at the top, good customer service seems to play a big role in who gets to continue and who falls behind. Since customers are influenced by their interactions with your employees and are willing to pay more for a good experience, we can understand that neglecting this is not a smart choice. On the contrary, excellent customer service had the power to transform your business and increase your profit.
