It’s really important to match customer service with your brand. No matter how great your branding is, if you don’t walk the walk – it won’t matter how well you talk the talk.
In other words, if you’re trying to sell yourself as a premium service, you need to offer premium service. If you’re brand is cheap and cheerful, you’ll go broke if you spend too much time with each client. Including spending hours trying to solve every problem or complaint and offer refunds at the drop of a hat.
Once you know where you want to position yourself in the market get designing (or a designer). Find colours, fonts, logos and other graphics that support the position you want to project. Here are some of the things to consider when creating your customer service policy:
If you want to offer a Premium Service
Premium service tends to revolve around personalised interactions, ease of use, and small touches not necessarily related to the current purchase. For example, Birthday cards with vouchers or a free gift. Or, by adding something to the order to get the most from your purchase such as: high quality furniture polish or a cloth protector with a sofa; a quality laptop bag with a laptop purchase)
Some premium options to consider are:
- Multiple contact channels
- Extended support hours
- A “100% satisfaction” guarantee
- Money back guarantee
- Easy returns (including accepting shipping charges for returns)
- Web based tracking of the project/shipping/service
- Specific account managers for each client
- Premium Pricing (to create an air of exclusivity and high quality)
- Customer service staff with exceptional communication skills (including excellent grammar, business writing skills, perfect spelling and an eye for detail)
- Thank you cards or gifts for clients
Regular or Middle of the Road Service
Those aspiring to a more middle of the road service level may want to offer service that’s more laid back while still being professional. Some things to consider are:
- Contact via phone, email, website form and Facebook/Twitter at the minimum, plus other social media channels and/or web chat if you have the capability to staff it.
- Clearly defined hours for support personnel to be available
- Guarantees and “extras” that support your business image
- “Self-help” portals and a well written and regularly updated FAQ
- Customer service staff who are friendly and genuinely want to help your customers
- Make sure your pricing reflects your market position. You can only charge premium prices if BOTH your service AND product is premium if you lack in either, then set your prices accordingly
- Discounts for certain expenditures (free postage for orders over $150, 10% off your next order)
Cheap & Cheerful
Just because you want your point of difference to be your price model, it doesn’t mean you can do without customer service. In fact, it’s one of the areas where having great customer service staff can make all the difference. Some things to consider are:
- Managing expectations is vital. Have your policies on returns, service levels, payments etc. documented in plain English on your website and on printed materials
- Staff don’t need to be strictly customer service focused, in fact including staff from a variety of areas within the business can increase everyone’s awareness of issues
- Make sure that any customer facing staff have a genuine desire to help but the ability to stick to policy and say no even when dealing with angry customers
- A lot of training and support for customer facing staff so they are clear on the corporate line, know how to handle any type of situation and know that they have management support.
- Introduce Customer Rewards programs (Spend $100 in a month and receive 10% off your next order) to encourage repeat custom
- If legally viable (you should know whether this is possible in your area) offer vouchers instead of refunds. That way money will still be spent in your business and you have a second chance to wow the customer.
- Introduce a bit of fun into your client communications – use humour whenever it’s appropriate in letters, emails, newsletters, have some fun and interesting business cards printed up that have a double use that matches your business (i.e.: Lego has Lego people business cards, Google business cards look like a Google Search result)
Nothing to nobody
It’s in nobody’s best interest to try to be everything to everyone. Marketing to the right customer will make your customer service a lot easier to formulate. And a lot more likely to be successful and encourage repeat business.
If you’d like some more ideas, check out my previous Customer Service posts
Click here to book a complimentary 30 minute catch up to discuss how I could help you to improve your customer service.
