Making changes and improvements to your customer service processes can have a huge effect on your business. It can improve your image, change customers to advocates, improve staff morale and lead to an increase in profits. However, making changes for the point of change is rarely successful. Instead you need to make considered changes and improvements.
When you want to improve your customer service, it’s important that you keep in mind:
- What your clients want/need
- What is best practice in your industry
- What your business can realistically manage
Obviously, there are likely to be other issues that are specific to you and your industry, but these three ideas are key to getting the improvement process right.
What Your Clients Want / Need
There is absolutely no point bringing in improvements that your customers don’t care about. They won’t advance your business in any way and they won’t improve the customer experience.
The best way to find out what your clients want and need is to ask them. You can either leave it open and ask clients for their wish lists, or you can offer a few choices of things that you know you could implement and ask them to tell you which they like.
The second method is the one most likely to get results. If you want an easy way to do this, try setting up a simple Poll on your website, or use something like SurveyMonkey to produce a survey you can email out to clients or embed on your website.
What Is Best Practice In Your Industry
Find out what your competitors are doing, and what their clients love. That’s not to say you need to copy your competitors – you’ll only do well if you’re being you. But by knowing what the best practice in your industry is, you’ll be better able to judge how your business stacks up.
Some ways to find out what best practice in your industry is:
- Read industry journals and other publications
- Participate in industry based online forums
- Attend conferences, training and networking events
- Talk to colleagues and customers
If you’re new to the whole idea, try running a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) Analysis on your business to see where you currently stand.
Once you’ve found out what best practices are in your industry look at them and see if you can adapt them to your business. If they don’t work for your business, don’t use them – but if you know what they are you can make an informed choice.
What Your Business Can Realistically Manage
This is important because it doesn’t matter how super-awesome your new customer service initiative is, if you can’t provide it well and regularly, then it’s a waste of time and a huge business liability.
The one thing sure to inflame customers is to be promised one thing and receiving another. So if your customer service improvement is to offer 1 hour turnaround 24/7 – you need to make sure you have someone staffing the customer service contact portals 24/7. You can’t assume that because nobody has contacted you at 3am before that nobody will. If you can’t offer 24/7 then offer 1 hour turnaround between 9am and 5pm or 8am and 8pm or whatever hours you can realistically cover.
If you have these things in mind when you start to plan your improvement processes and keep them in mind throughout the whole change process, you’ll end up with a genuinely improved business thanks to taking the time to improve your customer service in the right way.
