Do you Know the Best Practices of Customer Service?

BY Rachel Cagle
Featured image for “Do you Know the Best Practices of Customer Service?”

How are you continuing to earn loyalty from your clients? Are you still giving them reasons to progress your business relationship by fulfilling their individual needs using the best practices of customer service? You need to contribute to your clients’ experience with your company, even after the sales process has been completed and the new client doesn’t need any additional products or services from you. Here are a few ways you can continue to earn your client's loyalty through fulfilling their customer service needs, according to Aditya Mishra, writing for CustomerThink.

Best Practices of Customer Service

Understanding

How well do you know your clients’ needs? Not their business needs that you just helped them solve with your product or service. Their customer service needs. At the very least, you should understand your new client's expectations of you and how they prefer to be contacted. Communication is one of the best practices of customer service, after all. Does this particular client expect you to check in on them on a regular basis? How often is that, exactly? And how would they prefer you to reach out to them? Are they more outgoing and direct, therefore expecting you to contact them with phone calls? Or does their busy schedule (and perhaps also a bit of introversion) call for a contact method that is a bit less direct, such as a text, email or social media outreach? Or do you not know for sure which contact method they prefer? It’s about time you found out.

Feedback

Best practices of customer service are all about knowledge. This includes both their personalities (which tie in to communication, as mentioned above) and their needs. All you have to do to know whether you’re fulfilling your client's customer service needs or not is to ask your clients directly for feedback. This will take all the speculation and guess work out of determining how you can better serve your clients. The best times to ask for feedback are when your service is fresh in your client's mind. When you first close a sale or after you have serviced your client's business needs, ask them how things went. What parts of your interaction did they like and what parts would they like to see changed going forward? Do they have any comments on how your service can be improved? Ask and ye shall receive.

Emotion

When you were researching and going through the sales process with your client, you probably picked up on and discussed a few things outside of work that they’re passionate about. These passions could range from local sports teams, a college you both attended or a popular TV show or book series they avidly consume. You may not have known it, but that information ties into the best practices of customer service. When you know what your client is passionate about, insert some of that knowledge into your customer service outreach to pique their interest in your message. For example, after a big game, you could send an email with the good old IT Crowd subject line, “Did you see that ludicrous display last night??” and open your message with sports talk before transitioning into business talk. That’s far more engaging than the stereotypical starter, “Just checking in.”


Share: