Analysing Your Customer Service

Customer service is a vital aspect of any business that deals with its customers on a regular basis. Whether you are selling a product or service directly, or you are fielding customer queries and complaints, you have to have a strict and robust set of customer service principles that inherently spell out your company brand and ideals, provide ultimate customer satisfaction levels and maintain the integrity of company performance and profits. With careful analysis of customer service strategies, communication channels, and the customer experience from start to finish, you can begin to develop long-term targets and strategies that will stand the company in good stead for many years to come.

How you deal with your customers should be your number one priority as a business. Choose a communication channel, or multiple platforms, where your customers know they can speak to a member of your team, or make quick and easy enquiries. If you sell items online, order taking forms can be a good start; live chat is where many modern customers want to ask quick questions, or through social media. For inbound customer service telephone calls, ensure your staff members are fully trained and well-versed in everything to do with your business, products and services, and brand.

The customer journey must be consistent above all else. A consumer expects the exact same experience when talking to a customer service agent from your company on the phone as they would when walking in to a physical store and asking for assistance with a complaint. How you deal with these issues is important for brand recognition and integrity, pointing out the values of the company for all to see.

Provide full and extensive training for your staff to understand the processes and standards you expect from them in terms of customer service. Take the time to regularly analyse performance and to run through customer service processes, seeing which areas could be improved upon and which areas are strong. Speak to your staff members, as well as taking pointers direct from staff, both directly and through mystery shopping programmes (specialist services are the best bet to help you with this aspect of customer service analysis and retention).

Your customers are the most important thing about your business. You may have come up with the critical idea for the product or service that you sell, found staff members that share your vision, found financing and office and production space, marketed your product with an innovative edge, but without customers there is nowhere for your business to go. Look for professional customer experience services that can help you analyse your customer journey and how your customer service team are dealing with customer queries and complaints. This could be in the form of retail audits, mystery shopping over multiple platforms, or a wide range of other options. Being able to have a clear and honest appraisal of your company is the only true way to make real and honest change to policy and direction, so be prepared to dig deep, to analyse, and change whenever necessary, in order to build a strong loyal customer base.