Keeping Your Customers Happy – A Guide To Quality Service

Unhappy customers are not good for business. If you fail to resolve your customers’ misgivings, you risk losing them and ultimately profit too.

Keeping them happy is therefore incredibly important, and there are a few great ways to boost that happiness.

In this business blog article, we’ve listed our top methods of getting in front of any issues that may dent your reputation and loss of sales.

So how do you keep your business in a positive light with unhappy customers?

Quality Service Guide

Service starts with a deeper understanding of customer needs, and that requires the ability to listen so that you can ensure success in your interactions with them.

Listen To Customers

Of course, not everything is going to always go smoothly when it comes to running a business. We’re human, and mistakes happen.

Your customers don’t expect perfection. However, what they want is good customer service when things don’t go to plan.

Sometimes customers just aren’t happy with the products they’ve bought or the service they’ve received. This isn’t ideal. In fact, if your business doesn’t act professionally and resolve customer complaints promptly, the outcome can be dire for your business.

Therefore you shouldn’t just dismiss these customers by saying, “these things happen”. While they do just happen, it’s crucial to understand precisely what the problem is so that you can remedy the situation. The starting point to resolving customer dissatisfaction is communication.

Listen to your customers and clients and practice authentic, active listening in your customer service team.

Avoid Templated Responses

Ideally, your business will recognize when templated responses are no longer enough.

Avoid copy and paste responses whenever possible, as this tends to show that whoever is dealing with that particular case hasn’t listened to the problem at all. This will instantly lose your business respect from that customer, and you might risk losing their business altogether.

First Call Solution

Very few people actively enjoy calling customer services, so having to call a second or third time can not only be frustrating but incredibly stressful for the customer.

Instead, you and your team should be striving to resolve any of their problems as quickly as possible, and preferably on the first call.

Reduce Hold Times

Similarly, avoid leaving customers who have contacted your customer support service on hold for too long.

The issue here is that unhappy customers will become frustrated with the lack of attention, which could drastically impact your reputation. You really want to avoid a disgruntled customer leaving a negative review, which may dissuade others from buying from you or using your services.

Sometimes, it’s important to put someone on hold if you’re going to discuss things with a manager or need to focus on pulling up account information. When you’re doing this, though, it’s essential to inform the caller of roughly how long they’ll be on hold and why you’re explicitly putting them on hold too.

Work quickly and efficiently to ensure that you don’t leave them for too long.

Cater To Different Needs

Customer service isn’t always just about taking calls and handling complaints. This also involves how you offer your services and the ease of access to purchasing your products.

There are many things to consider during this process, from the quality of your online stores to the amount of information you provide.

Something that businesses don’t always think about either, especially for large purchases or subscriptions, is the availability of direct mail-order information.

Transaction email vs Direct Mail

A standard choice today is to send a receipt via a transaction email but weighing up the pros and cons of transaction email vs. direct mail is very important.

Most people tend to prefer an email with their order information. However, there are still many people who enjoy being sent a hard copy which they can file away for future use.

Check out some more information on this decision before making your choice. Providing the option for both formats of order details can be a really great idea as it reduces the chance that the customer will lose the information in the future.

Train Your Team Well

Being able to handle any situation that is thrown at them is an ideal trait for your team.

Having a team of experts that understands your company culture and how your business works are vital to resolving customer complaints. Training will ensure callers are not passed over to different departments and that problems can be resolved accurately and quickly.

If there’s one thing that callers will hate more than being on hold for too long, it’s being bounced between different departments who don’t seem to know who is meant to handle their problems. Instead, your team needs to have quality training and understanding of the myriad of issues that could arise so that they can efficiently deal with these problems before they escalate into further complaints.

Be Transparent With Orders

If you can’t guarantee a delivery time, don’t tell your customers you can—it’s as simple as that. An excellent example of when this can be an issue and lead to some very annoyed customers is when they’re purchasing clothing. In many cases, clothing is going to be bought for a specific occasion.

If someone sees that the delivery estimate is before an event that they’re buying the item for, and when it arrives after the event, you’ll risk getting some very negative reviews as well as returned items.

Be open with your customers about their orders and consider utilizing quality tracking software to get a good idea of where their package is.

Reward Loyalty Properly

Oftentimes, loyal customers get overlooked. Why reward people if you know they’re always going to buy from you no matter what? The issue here is that you don’t actually know that at all.

You might not have strong competitors now, but if one does appear and begins attracting even your most devout customers and clients, it may be too late to keep their attention on your business. Preempt this possible issue by taking good care of your customers and rewarding long-term buyers with discounts and special offers.