Customer service is the support that a company offers its customers, usually starting during the purchasing process and continuing afterward. This includes a wide variety of activities, from providing information and advice to troubleshooting and problem resolution. While a great deal of customer service can be automated, there are often times when a courtesy and empathetic conversation with a trained representative is crucial to customer satisfaction.
Companies typically offer a range of ways to contact customer service, including telephone, email, webchat, and social media. However, the best customer service isn’t about which channels you choose to use – it’s about meeting customers where they are – and that means providing them with multiple options for assistance.
A good way to improve your customer service is to focus on eliminating repetitive issues that your team spends a lot of time answering. This could be a combination of things, from common questions that can be easily answered in your help center to specific problems that can be resolved with better user onboarding or in-app tips.
It’s also important for your customer service representatives to have strong emotional intelligence, which is the ability to recognize and manage their own emotions. For example, if you have several complicated issues come in at once, you can use your emotional intelligence to recognize that your heart is beating faster and that you might start to feel overwhelmed. Then, you can take a deep breath to calm yourself down before you tackle the requests at hand.
Another way to improve your customer service is to invest in training your customer support staff. The most effective training focuses on skills that enable customer service agents to build trust with their customers. This is important because trust is a key factor in customer loyalty. If a customer is confident that they can trust your agent, they are more likely to return to your business for future purchases and recommend it to their friends and family.
A good way to increase the reach of your customer service is by getting a toll-free number. These numbers are identified by a distinctive three-digit phone number that starts with 1800. They allow your customers to call you without incurring charges on their phone (although they may incur roaming or airtime charges if they’re calling from outside the US and Canada). In addition to increasing your market reach, toll-free numbers are easy for your sales and technical teams to remember and share with potential clients when closing a sale. They can also increase brand trust and word of mouth marketing. Lastly, they’re easy for your existing customers to refer to their friends and family. Customer Service Numbers