Top tips to improve your customer service

Customer service is a tricky beast sometimes, and it all depends on how your customer service team can navigate their way through your customers’ requests. For some businesses, this strategy functions naturally, but for others, their customer service experience leaves much to be desired. Here’s how to level up your customer service experience and ultimately improve your business’s reputation and revenue. 

Before we start, you need to understand how great, good, bad and ugly customer service can impact your business. Ugly customer service, the type where you contact the business and they either ignore you or refuse to assist you, is the level of customer service that tells a customer they are not valued and as such, that customer will not be returning or recommending that business, and will tell friends and family of their experience, warning them not to patronise that business. Reviews like this can massively hurt a business’s revenue stream and reputation, so it’s very important to be responsive and helpful if a customer contacts you.

Bad customer service can be when a customer gets a response from the business, but it’s not helpful or timely. While they may hop online to vent about their experience, it might not completely reflect the business’ overall reputation as it can be a fluke. Good customer service is responsive, timely and helpful, which sums up what most customers are expecting from businesses at a minimum. But great customer service goes above and beyond the standards of helping a customer, and this is what makes a company stand apart from the rest.

How can your business go from ugly, bad or good customer service to great?

Being responsive is one of the most important factors of decent customer service. If the customer service team respond quickly but failed to assist, the customer will remember that while the business was unable to help, they responded quickly, assuming that the issue they had may have been a unique scenario. However, if the business was able to assist with the issue quickly, and be responsive, then that’s a gold star from the customer.

One of the best ways to manage incoming customers without having to worry if your customer service team is available or online is by using Click4Assistance’s AI chatbot, Artie, with your live chat for websites. He is always online to greet your customers, no matter what time of the day it is, putting your customer service instantly online. By having an AI chatbot like Artie on your website, your responsiveness is immediate, which instantly improves your customer service satisfaction rate.

Honesty is the best policy. Sometimes it’s better to tell a customer that you can’t really help them because it’s outside of their support level than just ignore them. This way the customer is aware and left to make a choice, to upgrade their support level or try to fix the problem themselves. When a customer is ignored, they can become disgruntled and this leads to an unnecessary knock on the business’s reputation, which is not a desired outcome.

Going out of your way to help a customer pays off in the long run as customers who have experienced stellar customer service talk about it, and this puts a very positive light on your business. Think about it: when you are scrolling through Facebook and you come across a status update about someone’s experience with a company, it’s either outstanding or terrible, not okay or good. For someone to write a personal review on their social media, it has to be an experience that they need to tell others about, to either encourage or discourage future patronage.

Having great customer service does not need to feel like an impossible task. By employing some of the tips above, your business will benefit greatly in both reputation and revenue.

With over 15 years of experience, Click4Assistance is the best live chat for websites in the United Kingdom. Working with businesses just like yours, Click4Assistance has developed a robust software solution that is remote working ready and as secure as a payment page. If you’re interested in deploying Click4Assistance, the UK’s premier GDPR compliant live chat software solution, to increase your business’ productivity for 2020, give us a call on 08451235871 or send an email to theteam@click4assistance.co.uk and one of our experts will be with you right away. Not ready to reach out yet? Discover how it works, try a demo, or better yet, try Click4Assistance completely free for 21 days.