Ten ways to improve your customer service

Ten ways to improve your customer service

    OK, so you know that improving customer service is the best way to improve retention, drive referral and grow your brand. And you’re now ready to take an active step to improve how you look after your customers. But where do you start? Here are a few tips to help you achieve customer satisfaction.

1.  Allow customers to give feedback when it suits them

Your customers may not have specific feedback when you ask for it, but if you leave the door open for comments you’re more likely to get a higher quality and a greater quantity of feedback.

2.  Share feedback with the whole team

Everyone in the organisation has an effect on what your customers say about you. So they deserve to know what customers say and understand how they can improve as individuals and as a team.

3.  Show feedback in the customers’ own words

Using the words that the customer has actually said has a huge impact on those listening, because you get a real feel of who the customer is and why they said what they did; making it easier to respond effectively.

4.  Take action on feedback

Customers expect you to respond to what they have said. Customers who have their problems resolved will tell four to six people about their positive experience. Your actions may range from simply saying “thank you”, to making actual changes to your product and service.

5.  Tell customers what you have done with the feedback

Now that you’ve taken action on feedback, you should tell customers what you have done and how it affects them. After all, you’ve taken a step to improve; which is really good news that a lot of your customers will want to hear about.

6.  Once you have opened the door of communication keep it open

Eighty per cent of complaints received by an organisation are likely to have poor communication as their root cause. Your customer may have only left a simple bit of feedback but it’s an opportunity to bounce ideas off them and ask them about any areas for improvement.

7.  Make customer service surveys short and sweet

Give them just a few quick questions to answer and maybe a comment box if they have something specific to add. This way you’re likely to get more responses, and customers will take more time over each answer, giving you better feedback.

8.  Keep all feedback together and organised

If you have one central place to hold feedback it makes it easier to follow-up with customers and spot patterns in customer comments. For example, if you can see lots of comments on one particular problem you can quickly see how it has affected customer satisfaction.

9.  Regularly report results

You can tell how well your feedback system is working through recording the number of people feeding back, any common issues, how much of it is negative/ positive, and what actions have been taken as a result of feedback.

10.  Allow them to remain anonymous

Feedback without a name is no less valid or valuable, so why force them to provide this information? This can influence their decision to give feedback and can affect their opinion of the company as well.

Kerry Morrow is Marketing Executive at Customer Sure which offers customer service software, including a free 30-day trial.

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