All of us have, at some point, had a terrible customer experience. Who hasn’t been left waiting on the phone – usually after struggling with a complicated series of telephone options – before finally reaching someone in a call centre who can’t really help?
Don’t let this happen to your customers! Proving outstanding customer support is a sure-fire way to improve your business, especially if you are a smaller, local company trying to differentiate yourself from a larger, faceless multi-national corporation.
Outstanding customer support goes beyond fixing a specific problem. It includes anticipating common frustrations and communicating a solution to the frustration. Outstanding customer support can also help you gain new customers. Educating potential customers on new approaches to their work which they haven’t thought of can overcome the natural reluctance most people have to change.
A few tips on treating your customers right:
- Don’t make them wait. Respond to every customer contact quickly – even if it’s just a simple acknowledgement of their request, so that they know that they have been heard and that you are interested in helping.
- Consider their perspective. Even though the problem might not seem critical to you – it certainly is to them. Think about how it is impacting their business operations, and how you can find a solution that improves things for them.
- Fix their frustrations. In our line of work, what we try to do is to remove the (very common) frustration of dealing with printers – often the most annoying office device to work with.
- Help them find the right solution. People often stick to the comfort of the familiar and don’t see a reason to change. Our job is to help educate them in ways to improve that they may not have considered before. Use your industry knowledge and how-to to help them identify hidden costs, eliminate inefficiencies and create a happier, more functional workplace.
Our company has been able to achieve substantial growth despite the total market for our products not having increased at all. I think our culture of offering exceptional customer support and being sure that we understand our customers’ needs is what has propelled us forward.