At the end of the day, no matter what sort of business you run, providing good customer service is an absolute must if you want to keep your current customer base happy and expand it in the future.
However, all too often, good customer service is ignored in favor of temporary measures or support stop gaps that can leave your customers feeling ignored and dissatisfied, potentially even causing them to turn towards your competitors instead.
Fortunately, the good news is that providing good customer service isn’t hard, you just need a proper understanding of the 3 important qualities of customer service so that you can ensure your business is meeting all of them in one form or another.
Take a look at our guide below for more information on these key points of customer service, and a little bit on why customer service is important in the first place.
Why is customer service important?
As we’re no doubt sure you’ve heard from many sources, a good customer experience and service are rapidly becoming the key differentiator for consumers between whether they choose your business or someone else in your industry.
Unlike in the past, good customer service is an expectation in the modern day, rather than a nice side bonus offered by your business. Thus, it is incredibly important for you to master this area, as bad customer service can affect your business in numerous ways.
There are, of course, many ways to improve your customer service, such as promptly answering calls, handling customer complaints with understanding and empathy, and actually fixing areas of your business or products that are causing customer problems to begin with.
However, in order to do any of this properly, you also need to understand the most important characteristics of customer service so that you can set up a customer service operation that meets the needs of your customers.
What are the 3 most important things in customer service?
When it comes to providing a good customer experience, there are ultimately 3 key points of customer service that you need to be aware of and master. That way, you can deliver the sort of support that your customers not only expect but appreciate.
Take a look at our breakdown of the 3 most important characteristics of customer service below:
1. Provide easy access to information
First of all, a large number of customer complaints are often the result of misinformation or misunderstandings about the products and services you offer. Consumers might be getting more savvy, but if basic and important information about your products is hidden or unavailable to customers, this is going to cause frustration.
So, in order to make calling you a last resort, make sure that they can find as many answers as possible around common problems online. Update your website’s knowledge base with the most recent information, ensuring that what is there is understandable and helpful, and make sure any FAQS, videos, tutorials, and forums are readily accessible.
2. Provide live chat support
Often a key overlooked part of modern customer service, in spite of everything now being online, offering a solid live chat function is an absolute must for delivering good customer service.
With a live chat option, customers can get in touch with you instantly and potentially get a solution to their issue within minutes, rather than having to wait on a phone line or for your team to respond to an email. Customers want solutions now, and a live chat setup seamlessly facilitates this.
3. Work with them, not against them
Finally, for point 3, your main goal of any customer service interaction should be to work with them rather than against them. At the end of the day, all customers want is to find a solution to the issue they’re experiencing, and they’ve turned to your business because you’re the experts.
Therefore, it’s very important to impress upon those handling customers that their goal is to understand and acknowledge the problems a customer is facing, and then calmly work towards an ideal solution. You should not be getting defensive because a customer has criticized your business and may come across as frustrated.
Set up live answering with VoiceNation
And there you have it, now you know what the core important characteristics of customer service are, with a little bit of insight into how you should be applying them. However, one area of customer service we didn’t touch on was managing your incoming calls, because missing even one of these could impact your business more than you think.
And that’s exactly where VoiceNation can help. Experts in the field of live answering, our team of professionally trained virtual receptionists answer every call with the empathy and understanding your customers expect. Not only that, but we even offer a 24/7 answering service, so you won’t miss any calls outside of business hours.
Get in touch with the VoiceNation team today to learn more about our services in detail, as well as our different price packages.