Customer service is a part of every business. It doesn’t matter how much emphasis you decide to put on it, your customers will make up their own minds about its importance and if there’s a discrepancy between your quality, pricing and service levels, you’ll find customers will go elsewhere. So it’s important to make sure you offer the best customer service possible. However in most small business and even in lean, medium sized businesses the time taken to provide customer service usually means time away Checkfrom your core business.
That’s where working with a Virtual Assistant can help. From virtual receptionists to Virtual Assistants managing your customer service email accounts there’s a lot they can do to help improve customer service and leave staff to focus on their core duties. Here are five things a Virtual Assistant can do that will improve your customer service offering:
Take care of the unpleasant stuff A Virtual Assistant can ring your customers about outstanding accounts. They can talk to people with serious complaints, or those people who may just be terminally dissatisfied. The benefit of having a Virtual Assistant talk to any of these people is twofold. Firstly, they are at a little distance from the business so it’s not as personal when someone attacks their business either because they think an invoice is too much, or they don’t like your product / service. Secondly, there is a limit to what a Virtual Assistant can offer so it gives you an opportunity to think about how you’d like to respond.- Cover times when you’re not around You might have a Virtual Assistant in a different time zone, or just have a Virtual Assistant who looks after phones, social media, emails etc. when you’re in meetings or involved in other activities. You might have several Virtual Assistants who cover both. Working with a Virtual Assistant gives you some additional flexibility and can make your business seem much larger while still providing a premium level of support.
- Documentation A Virtual Assistant can document policy, create procedure manuals, templates and guidelines so that all your staff can have a degree of autonomy when dealing with customers. One of the biggest delays in providing customer service is when a staff member has to get permission from a superior before acting, so giving staff clear guidelines on what they can and can’t do allows them to act to get the best result possible as quickly as possible. It also stops managers from spending too much time dealing with minor customer issues and allows them to focus on their core jobs, and spend more time with customers with more serious or complicated issues.
- Help your customers DIY Giving customers the ability to solve their own issues is immensely valuable. You may worry that you’ll lose some customers and it’s possible that you will, but they’re probably not your ideal customer anyway. Most people will probably look up DIY instructions and decide that it’s worth paying you to do it to save themselves the hassle. So posting some videos and blog posts showing how to do what you do is really valuable. You can also have your Virtual Assistant create images and infographics for social media giving tips and tricks for getting the most out of your products or services.
- Getting Feedback Your Virtual Assistant can create a survey or questionnaire and send it out to your customers to help you understand what they really want, how they feel about your products and/or services, even just how they feel about your brand. You’ll need to work with your Virtual Assistant to come up with the questions, but once you’ve decided what you want to ask, your Virtual Assistant can create the survey or questionnaire, distribute it and collate the answers so they’re easy for you to read.
