Top tips for excellent customer service

Keeping customers happy, ensuring that they come back in the future and encouraging them to sell the merits of your firm to their friends, relations and colleagues is an aspiration of the majority of businesses. There are a number of ways to do this and one of the most effective of these is to provide excellent customer service...

But this is easier said than done. Starting and maintaining a good relationship with customers can be a difficult task but once you get the basics right, it can make the difference between the success and failure of your business. Always remember that once a customer has lost faith in your service, it is very difficult to restore.

Be honest

The number one rule is not to make promises to customers unless you know you can deliver upon them. Often customers come through to customer service whenever they have already encountered problems with your product or service. To promise to remedy the situation, say by rebooking a delivery time or saying you'll call back within the next hour, and then fail to do so will leave customers angry and dissatisfied. If you can't solve the problem immediately, say so. Customers will tend to be more forgiving if you level with them.

Don't pass customers from pillar to post

When there is problem, deal with it first time and ensure that it is dealt with speedily and with the least amount of hassle to the customer.

Be friendly and polite in your dealings with customers. Ensure they feel valued by your business and that their complaints or views are genuinely taken into consideration. In a telephone call, give customers a chance to air their grievances rather than talking over them. Courtesy costs nothing and will go a long way to building up a sound and long-term relationship with customers.

Understand your customers better

The primary objective of your customer service is to resolve problems, answer enquiries and generally to make the customer's experience of buying from you as easy, clear and smooth as possible. At another level, it is an opportunity to gain insight into the concerns and opinions of customers and, as already mentioned, a chance to tailor your product or service.

It is also a chance to sell but this must be done, if at all, sparingly and sensitively. The long-term goal is to satisfy customers and try to ensure that they will come buy from you in the future and they may not appreciate a hard sell when they have contacted you with a problem.

Know everything there is to know

Dealing with customer enquiries requires knowledge of the business, the products and services, the prices, the terms and conditions, the guarantee terms, promotions and so on. It is imperative that those actually answering the enquiries from customers know about every aspect of the company and the product/service range otherwise they will look unprofessional and ill-informed.

Make your products and services better

Use your customer service to help you to refine and hone your service or product. When customers regularly call to ask questions about the assembly instructions you provide with a certain product, for example, you should take this as a signal that the instructions are not adequately detailed or clear for all of your customers. This gives you the opportunity to provide better instructions next time, improving the customer experience as you go along and reducing the number of calls you receive on that particular aspect of the service.

Never lose your cool

There's no point in getting into a heated argument with your customers where it can be avoided. Never lose your temper and always concentrate on the resolution rather than focus on the nitty gritty of the problem. Sometimes you may need to back down in a negotiation to retain the loyalty of your customers even when you know they are in the wrong.

Don't be elusive

Make it easy for customers to get in touch with you. Find out what ways your customers prefer to get in touch with you. If, for example, you run an internet ordering company, you may find that the vast majority of your customer contact will be by email. Therefore, you should ensure that you have a 'Contact Us' link on every page of the website and in a prominent position.

If you run a mail order company, your customers may prefer to contact you by post or by telephone. Ensure that your contact details are on all your correspondence with customers - invoices, receipts, guarantees, compliments slips, letters, quotations and so on - and that enquiries are answered promptly.

Don't confuse your customers

Don't use jargon or try to blind your customers with science. You will know more about the product than they do and you should seek to simplify and explain what's happening in plain, clear language. If the customer feels he is being patronised or talked down to he will be much less likely to buy from you in the future.

Understand the specifics of a complaint

Try to structure calls from customers as best you can. Customers will often call with a grievance and they should be allowed to air it in the first instance. Once this is done, an experienced customer service representative with take the opportunity to seize control of the direction of the conversation. You should break the problem down into specific points and summarise these back to the caller to clarify the exact nature of the complaint and to show that you are aware of what the problems are.

Go through the points one by one and offer resolutions there and then. Be clear about the actions: what the caller needs to do and what you have promised to do. Make sure the caller can get back to you if necessary or, if they get through to someone else, that that individual will be aware of the nature of the original call.