Running a small business is always a big challenge. With lots of issues to be resolved on a daily basis and just a few helping hands to do it, you need to prioritize. You may think that while you are just starting, customer service can be put on the back burner.
Wrong. With this approach, you are likely to lose whatever first customers you have and not attract new ones. For 61% of customers, just one case of sub-standard experience is enough to abandon a business for its competitor. On the other hand, good service may not only retain customers but also bring new ones – in 92% of cases, people trust reviews by their friends, so if your service creates a good experience, you may get referrals.
It is critical that every step of the way, your business provides superb service. That’s why, in this guide to small business customer service, in addition to the customer service basics, we gathered some useful tips about how to create stellar experiences. Let’s start!
Table of Contents
What is Customer Service?
The first answer to this question that possibly pops into your head is “fixing issues”. This is true, but not completely. While fixing issues and responding to complaints is an important part of customer service, it is, in fact, much wider.
Customer service includes all-round support, and it may start well before the purchase. It includes consulting on the product, finding the most suitable item or subscription, providing information about payments, deliveries, and refunds, and, of course, post-purchase support.
How to Provide Excellent Customer Service?
When setting up a small business customer service, there are no cookie-cutter solutions. However, if you follow our recommendations, you may see a difference in your engagement and retention rates over time.
Understand Your Customer
This is a two-sided recommendation. Start with identifying your target customers – who they are, where they live and work, and why they are your customers at all. Study the demographics of your audience to outline your customer persona. Armed with this knowledge, you can improve not only your customer service but also marketing and, eventually, sales.
The other technique is to empathize with your customer. Once you know who they are and which pain points they expect you to resolve, relate to them. Try to step into their shoes and look through their eyes. This way, you will be able not only to understand their issues better but find solutions to them.
Invest in a Customer Service Tool
Gone are the days of doing customer service over the phone. Well, many modern tools do offer telephone communication as one of the channels, but note the phrase “one of”. Nowadays, customer service is usually done on a comprehensive platform supporting multiple channels – live chat, chatbot, email, instant messaging – plus other useful components, such as a customer database, a content management system, a ticketing tool, and many more.
If you are looking for such a tool, Zendesk may be one of the first you come across. It is a popular customer service system, but it is not the only solution with desk features that may suit your requirements. Compare the tools, and since most of them offer free trials, test them in your actual conditions. This way, you will be able to choose the solution that works best for you.
Offer Self-Service Content
Creating useful and relevant self-service content may be a challenging task as well as an investment, but this investment is going to bring heaps of returns. On the one hand, self-service resources hit the bullseye in terms of customer satisfaction – 90% of customers expect to find them.
On the other hand, think about how much time and resources your small support team may be freed if answers to the most frequent questions and solutions to the most common issues can be found on your website. Your agents may use this time to tackle more complex tasks, engage in self-development, or just relax and recharge.
Engage Everyone in Customer Service
In a small business, everyone often wears many hats. If we are talking about small business customer service, however, involving people outside the support team can have additional benefits.
When colleagues from the design or production departments see the issues with which customers reach out to support or the stages in their journey where they need help, they get a much better idea about what needs to be improved, once in a while, invite people from other teams to take a turn at the service desk to get a first-hand experience of what customers really think about your product.
Learn from Customer Feedback
Your customer service tool most probably, includes feedback collection options. Depending on your situation, you can ask customers to provide feedback at different stages of their journey – after a support chat completion, at checkout, or after the purchase. Feedback can take various forms – from a simple rating on a 1-10 scale to detailed reviews.
From feedback, especially of the negative kind, you can see much clearer what customers are not happy with. In turn, this information can show you the area you need to improve – it may be your product, your website, your pricing strategy, or your support team. Analyze the feedback and act on it.
Measure Your Performance
Monitor your performance metrics regularly to verify that your service is working as it should. You can track such global metrics as the overall customer satisfaction rate, customer churn rate, and customer conversion rate. These metrics show how people like interacting with your business and how likely they are to continue shopping with you.
For more service-specific insights, monitor the number of support tickets, the average resolution time, the first contact resolution rate, and other similar metrics. From these rates, you can get an idea of how well your support team works and if you need to take any actions.
For example, if you see very long resolution times, it may indicate that your team is overloaded, and you need either to expand it or find ways to route customer traffic to a chatbot or self-service resources. If very few issues are resolved on the first contact, your agents might need training.
Wrapping Up
No matter how small your business is, customer service is an essential part of it. If you set it up right, it will mean more happy customers who tell their friends and family about you. And, who knows, your business may eventually outgrow the word “small”.
