When you get started in business, your attention might be so focused towards ensuring that the quality of your product or service is as good as it can be, that you begin to neglect other factors that are arguably just as important. One of the more obvious of these factors could well be marketing, but it doesn’t just stop there. You have to think about your business through the eyes of your customers and what they might want out of any given interaction with you.
While you might want to be as rampantly successful as quickly as possible, being a treasured hit with customers might be more valuable than you expect.
Customer Service
This is a big one, and an aspect that you might feel doesn’t apply to you as much perhaps because of the sector that you operate within. However, at some point you are inevitably going to come into contact with your customers. This might be through your social media channels, it might be over the phone, or it might be in any customer-facing capacity that is a part of your operations. Regardless, though, the importance of quality customer service can’t be overstated, and it will greatly affect the impression your customers have of you.
How you approach this can be handled in different ways depending on the firm, with specific training perhaps being best for customer-facing roles, and measured, friendly responses being best on social media. For phones though, you might find it best to enlist a service that specializes in that area. You might first ask, ‘how much does telephone answering cost?’, but the answer might lie in how integral phones are to your business, and how much you value customer service through them.
Openness to Feedback
While there’s an element of this that might be included in customer service, making it known to your customers that they have the opportunity to provide you feedback is important. More important than that, though, is letting them know that this feedback matters and will be acted upon in the right circumstances. This can inform them that your business is about providing the best service that they can, and it will encourage them to be more involved when these opportunities arise.
As for how to conduct the opportunities for feedback themselves; there are any number of ways. However, using your social media channels, you can provide access to anonymous forms that might be most convenient.
Accessible Platforms
It’s not enough to just have a website or social media page, if those things are poorly designed and difficult to navigate, your customers might be put off using them altogether. Therefore, it’s paramount that you ensure these pages are clean, aesthetically-pleasing, and containing information that is clearly signposted and easy to get to. For example, if they want to get in touch for any reason, your customers will want to simply be able to go onto your website and find the page that contains all of your relevant details in this regard.
It sounds simple, but it can make simply traversing your pages and content a much more pleasurable experience.
