How to Provide Outstanding Customer Service

One of the best ways to keep your customers is to provide good customer service. Below I’ve listed 10 tips to make your customer service no only delight your customers, but potentially generate even more sales.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• patience

1. 1. Be Friendly
   
   This seems so obvious, yet many customer service reps aren’t. They read from a script in a monotone voice that tells you they would rather be anywhere then on the phone with you. Or, they seem like they’re not paying attention to you in person and would rather you just not be there, interrupting their 40 hour work week.
   
   Use your customer’s first name and address them with a smile. Even on a phone call, it’s funny how you can hear someone smile. Please and thank you goes a longggggg way.
   
   Ego is one of the main things that gets in the way of customer service. It’s ok to complain about customers to your co-workers… in-fact, I encourage it. Get your frustrations out before you talk to the customer. When someone complains about your product, make an honest attempt to make them happy. Look at it as a problem with your product and not the customer and make sure you phrase your emails that way.
   
   “I apologize that my widget did not perform the way that you had expected”
   
   -Not-
   
   “I don’t think that you know how to make my widget work correctly”

2. 2. Set Expectations
   
   Most angry customers come from unmet expectations. The best way to work around this is to set their expectations for them from the start. Don’t tell them you are going to do something you know you can’t do. Set a reasonable deadline and a reasonable outcome for whatever issue you are trying to resolve for them.

3. 3. Under Promise Over Deliver
   
   When setting expectations, under promise what you know you can do. If you know something will take you 4 days, tell the customer it will take 5 or 6. This way when you deliver your widget in 4 days they will think that you are awesome. They will also think that you went out of your way to work hard and finish early. This applies to features of your service.
   
   For example: I had a client who wanted me to design a simple php login system for their website where they would manually put customer information into the database. I gave them a price that was higher then I would normally charge for something like this because it gave me the opportunity to do much more for them. I created a management interface along with several other options that they did not expect. The result was a customer for life!

4. 4. Do what you say you are going to do
   
   I’m sure you’ve had to deal with a company telling you “We will call you back in about an hour” only to never call (even after you call them 5 or 6 times). If you make a promise to your customer, follow through with it. If you can’t finish what you promised them in time, at least give them the courtesy of letting them know how far along you are with their issue and that you are still working hard to fix it.

5. 5. Listen
   
   Don’t just hear what your customer has to say. Listen to what your customer has to say. Active listening involves expressions (both verbal and non-verbal). It also means that you make sure you understand exactly what your customer is telling you by restating their questions or complaint back to them in your own words.
   
   When I know someone is really listening to me I have a feeling of being a valued customer. This goes a long way when deciding which companies to use for which services.

6. 6. It’s all about the details
   
   If you really want to WOW your customers, take notes on details about them. These notes can be mental, scratched on a note pad, or recorded in your customer database.
   
   - Do they have kids?
   - How have you made them happy before?
   - When is their birthday?
   
   There is room to be creative with this one and tailor it to fit in with your business.

7. 7. Take ownership
   
   If your customer comes to you with a problem or a question, take ownership of it. Let them know that you will look into the issue personally and that you will make sure they get looked after.
   
   When I have a customer service representative take interest in helping me personally I am much more at ease with whatever gripe I had to begin with.

8. 8. When problem solving, be inclusive.
   
   Make your customer feel included in the solution to a problem. Even if they did nothing, make it seem like you worked as a team to fix the issue.
   
   I once had a customer that I spent a total of 13 hours on the phone with doing tech support for a high end enterprise network security product. I did almost all of the work since we were using remote support utilities. However, when I sent him the email summarizing everything that I did, I made him feel included by saying “We did this” and “We did that”.
   
   “Make it about WE not ME”

9. 9. Follow-up
   
   In the last example I said that I sent the customer an email summarizing everything that was done after the phone call. I wanted to follow-up with him to make sure he had a record of everything that we did in case the problem came up again.
   
   In that email I also made sure to tell him that if he had any further issues to not hesitate in contacting me again.
   
   Follow-up can also be done in the form of surveys. If you get any negative surveys make sure you contact that customer to find out what went wrong and what you can do to make it right.

10. 10. Make relationships not sales
    
    If you treat a customer like a friend it will be much easier to sell them your next product. At the expense of being redundant…. It is much harder and more expensive to get a new customer then it is to keep an existing one.

[ljsomma]

on 7/22/2009 great tips!