How to Improve Customer Service: 20 Essential Tips

Did you know that a customer’s experience with your employees is the leading motivation for them to leave a negative review or a positive review?

What is good customer service?

Good customer service involves actively providing outstanding help and support to new and existing customers before, during, and after a sale. It happens across a series of interactions and channels, including all touch points online and in person. It includes replying to customer comments and questions with transparency, increasing convenience, and making the customer experience as seamless and helpful as possible.

Understanding good customer service involves recognizing the importance of convenience, and responsiveness within your small business. By adopting these 20 tips for better customer service, your small business can improve its operations and deliver enhanced customer service consistently.

Why is good customer service important?

Offering consistently outstanding customer service is key to retaining customers. It’s also key to finding and converting potential customers.

When consumers leave reviews, having a negative experience with an employee is the leading motivation to leave a negative review. Many consumers say employee attitude is the most likely motivation for them to leave a business a one-star review. However, research shows that the reverse is also true. Having a positive experience with employees is also the leading motivation to leave a positive review.

The takeaway? Customer service can quite literally make or break your business. It can lead to your collection of 200 five-star reviews that catapult you to the top of the Google Map Pack of your accumulation of several one-star reviews that will trap you in the land of mediocrity.

Principles of Excellent Customer Service

Exceptional customer service is the main factor of a successful small business. To achieve this, you should follow these principles to ensure you have amazing customer service at your small business:

• Empathy: Put yourself in the customer’s shoes to truly understand their needs and concerns. This empathy creates a connection that goes beyond profits, fostering loyalty.
• Communication: Clear and effective communication is key!  Provide transparent information, ensuring customers are well-informed throughout their journey with your small business.
• Consistency: Maintain a consistent level of service throughout your business. Whether it’s in-store or online, consistency builds trust and reliability.
• Problem Resolution: Address issues promptly and efficiently. A quick resolution, with a positive attitude, can turn a negative experience into a great one, showing your commitment to customer satisfaction.
• Personalization: Treat customers as individuals. Personalize interactions based on their preferences and history with your small business.
• Proactivity: Anticipate customer needs and proactively address potential concerns. Being one step ahead demonstrates a commitment to exceptional service.

As you include these elements of great customer service into your small business, you are showing your clients that you care. The path to success in the world of customer service is created with empathy, communication, and a commitment to meeting expectations.

Building a Customer-Centric Culture

As a business owner, creating a customer-centric culture within your business is vital. Start by incorporating a customer-centric mindset across all levels. Emphasize that customer satisfaction is a shared responsibility of all your employees.

To build a customer-centric culture, you must teach employees how to adopt this mindset through investing in training programs and workshops. You should also equip your employees with the skills needed to provide exceptional service, emphasizing the value of building and maintaining customer relationships.

Here are key aspects to consider when building a customer-centric approach in your small business:

• Importance of Fostering a Customer-Centric Mindset: Instill a customer-centric mindset within your small business. Emphasize the significance of customer satisfaction as a shared responsibility to all your employees.
• Training Programs and Workshops: Invest in comprehensive training programs and workshops. Equip employees with the necessary knowledge to provide exceptional service.
• Empowering Frontline Staff: Empower frontline staff to make decisions and fix issues independently. Creating self-reliant employees creates confidence, allowing your employees to address customer concerns effectively.

By integrating these aspects into your small business, you create a culture where customer satisfaction is the top priority.

The Feedback Loop in Customer Service

By using the feedback loop in your small business, you are already a step ahead in making your customer service exceptional. Actively seek out what your customers have to say through surveys, reviews, and direct conversations. Look into these insights to truly understand their experiences and see what could use a bit of improvement within your small business.

Here’s how to use this great resource:

• Collecting Customer Feedback: Ask for feedback and customer opinions through surveys, reviews, and direct communication. Use this information to understand their experiences with your business and identify areas for improvement.
• Closed-Loop System: Implement a closed-loop system where feedback is not only collected but also looped back into your processes. This ensures that feedback from customers directly contributes to improvements in your services.
• Timely Response: Respond to customer feedback promptly. Whether positive or negative, acknowledging their input demonstrates your commitment to listening to customer needs.

The KPIs of Customer Service

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are very important for measuring and improving customer service. A KPI, or key performance indicator, is a metric that helps you measure and evaluate how well you’re achieving your business goals. Here are some KPIs you can measure:

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Measure overall customer satisfaction through surveys. Analyze the results to identify trends, strengths, and areas needing improvement.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Get a sense of customer loyalty by checking how likely they are to recommend your business to others. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a great tool to measure the overall sentiment and pinpoint areas where you can make things even better.
• First Contact Resolution (FCR): Evaluate the efficiency of issue resolution by measuring FCR. A higher FCR shows effective problem-solving, contributing to positive customer experiences.
• Average Response Time: Monitor the time it takes to respond to customer concerns. Quick responses demonstrate dedication and contribute to customer satisfaction.
• Customer Retention Rate: Take a look at the percentage of customers who stay around over a certain period. A high retention rate is a good sign, it means your customers are happy.

By looking into these key areas, you can not only measure the effectiveness of your customer service but also implement strategies for constant improvement in your small business.

How to Improve Customer Service: 20 Essential Tips

So, how do you improve your customer service in ways that count? Here are 20 of our favorite tips to deliver consistently outstanding customer service that will take your customers’ breath away every time.

1. Know your customers.

Take the time to understand what questions they’re going to ask. Anticipate possible issues or “pain points” they may come across with your service or product. A company that thoroughly understands how its customers interact with them is a company that offers excellent service.

2. Ask for customer feedback.

No matter how incredible your staff is, you’ll never be able to anticipate every customer service issue. And that’s okay. The key is to make sure you’re giving customers a consistent and easy way to provide customer feedback. This can include sending surveys after service, asking for verbal feedback after a service, or creating a specific forum where customers can voice opinions. A review tool like this one allows you to automate personalized review invites to ensure you never miss an opportunity.

Simplify the review process for your customers by sending them review requests via text message. With Podium Reviews, you can streamline the feedback collection process, ensuring that leaving a review becomes a quick experience for your customers.

3. Keep your employees happy.

You’ve heard of “happy wife happy life.” But have you heard “happy staff, (insert something that rhymes with staff)”? You definitely should have, because as anyone can see from mega titans such as Chick-fil-A, happy employees make for the best customer service.

To prioritize your employees, prioritize their work-life balance. Allow for flexible schedules, listen to their feedback and try to implement it, establish a good company culture, reward hard work and success, offer great benefits, and encourage time away to recharge.

4. Own your mistakes.

Admitting and taking ownership of your mistakes, even ones your customers haven’t discovered yet can go a long way in establishing long-lasting trust and restoring confidence with your customers.

Additionally, it puts you in control of the situation, allowing you to shape the narrative and resolve the problem. Owning your mistakes demonstrates strong leadership and a reassuring sense of accountability in a marketplace where many customers worry they are just another number or being used for their resources.

5. Respond to reviews.

Many consumers say a business’s responses to reviews have changed their perspective on the business. Your responses to the reviews you receive and your management of them offer key insight into how responsive, considerate, and responsible you are–and how much you care about your customers. Take the time to respond to all reviews, good and bad. Even if it’s a short statement, emoji, or promise to contact you personally, a response of any kind goes a long way.

Incorporating Podium Reviews into your strategy not only simplifies the review process for your customers but also empowers you with advanced tools to manage and improve your online reputation.

6. Engage regularly.

When you post something awesome on social media, your work is only halfway done. The backswing involves engaging regularly–replying to comments customers make on your posts, posts they create themselves, and questions or comments they send into the ether. This shows your customers that you’re listening and humanizes your brand significantly, increasing customer satisfaction.

Elevate your customer engagement and loyalty by personalizing every message with Podium’s Text Marketing. Tailor your messages to specific groups of customers, ensuring that your offers resonate with their preferences and needs. Personalized communication not only strengthens customer relationships but also drives increased revenue for your small business.

7. Offer all the options.

You heard that right. When it comes to communication, your clients should be able to receive customer support:

• In-person
• Via social media
• Via email
• Via phone and video chat
• Via text
• Via live chat

Taking an omnichannel approach ensures that your customers can contact you in the way that is most comfortable and convenient for them. Each of your clients is different and deserves to be met exactly where they are, whether online or in-store.

Consider incorporating solutions like Podium’s products to seamlessly include this approach:

• Webchat: Use Podium’s WebChat, a messaging tool located on your business’s website, enabling real-time communication with website visitors. With WebChat, you can engage with leads directly on your site, answering questions and providing assistance conveniently.
• Podium Channels: Simplify your customer interactions across platforms with Podium Channels. Connect with your customers on channels like Facebook and Google. Messages from every platform are routed into a single inbox for streamlined management. When your team responds, the message goes back to the customer through the same channel where the conversation came from.
• SMS Messaging: Explore the power of SMS messaging with Podium, a messaging platform that changes how you run your business. Sending a text becomes a powerful tool for managing your business operations effortlessly. Whether it’s for quick updates, promotions, or resolving customer inquiries, SMS messaging through Podium adds a personal touch to your customer interactions.

8. Make check-out seamless.

One of the most frustrating points of the customer journey for many customers is check-out. One in four customers will abandon a transaction with a local business if their preferred payment methods aren’t offered.

To avoid this pitfall and establish yourself as the business that makes payment fast and easy, offer as many payment options as possible, including Apple Pay, card, cash, phone, and even text-to-pay (a feature that allows you to send a secure link customers can click to pay).

9. Use text.

Did you know that text has a 209% higher response rate than phone, email, or Facebook? Over 65% of consumers think messaging makes working with local businesses more convenient, and consumers are twice as likely (1.8x) to prefer texting to any other communication method. Utilizing text to conduct your operations can significantly increase convenience and personalization for your customers, leading to you becoming the new go-to.

Use this opportunity to connect with your customers through the channel they prefer—texting. With a 98% open rate, texts become a powerful way to send tailored messages that can translate into customer sales within minutes.

10. Establish a stellar rewards program.

Create a rewards program that not only gives your customers a significant boost but also shows them just how much you care about their loyalty. Give your customers perks, exclusive benefits, and personalized experiences that go beyond the usual transactions, making them feel truly valued and appreciated.

11. Communicate clearly.

If your customer service team is small or you serve a huge demographic, it can be very difficult to keep up with customer communications and get back to everyone within a reasonable timeframe. However, clear and effective communication isn’t so much about time as it is about transparency. Whatever your most reasonable response time frame is, let customers know when you’re going to get back to them.

12. Offer stellar live chat support.

We’ve all seen the little icon at the bottom right of a home page and clicked it only to get caught in a bizarre, looping, frustrating conversation with a bot or an individual who has no idea what they’re talking about.

But the thing is, chat support has become an expectation, and almost two-thirds of your customers expect an immediate response when using it. How can you cater? A tool such as Webchat allows you to provide excellent live chat support via text, allowing customers to submit information and begin a conversation that can move asynchronously between their desktop and phone.

13. Practice active listening.

Active listening helps your customers to feel heard. Train your staff to clarify, rephrase, and use informed questions to understand what your customers are trying to say. Also teach them how to empathize and reflect with helpful phrases such as, “That must have been frustrating.” Often, what a customer needs most is to know that someone at your company understands them and validates their experience.

14. Follow-up.

Always. With everything! Distinguish yourself by being the team that follows up after you resolve an issue after a customer asks you a question you don’t yet know the answer to, after a customer verbally or digitally expresses a concern, etc. Sending a quick text or feedback survey is an easy way to let customers know you’re in their corner.

15. Make it personal.

As you already know, personalization is the name of the game. And there are a lot of ways to incorporate it successfully–send personalized birthday congratulations, offer special discounts for anniversaries, send thank-you cards, implement generous reward systems, etc. Make sure your campaigns and communications all address customers by name and take into account their history with you.

16. Offer self-help options.

We live in a culture obsessed with DIY. Why? Being able to help yourself makes people feel empowered and motivated. Great customer service involves this kind of empowerment, especially when your staff is off the clock.

Create a blog section on your website that addresses issues or questions that have been brought up in the past, or ones you might anticipate. Provide fun, interactive videos and whitepapers that help your customers to help themselves or get the most out of your service/product.

17. Stand behind your products.

Show your customers that you’ve got their back by considering a guarantee for your services, products, and even your fantastic team. This extra level of assurance not only builds trust but also lets your customers know that you’re completely dedicated to ensuring their satisfaction, setting the stage for long and happy relationships.

18. Have a little fun.

It may sound trivial, but we promise it’s not. While you’re implementing all of these tips, it’s important to not take yourself too seriously. Your customers want to know that you’re human–it makes you more accessible and appealing. Take the time to take a goofy staff photo for your Instagram at Halloween, or make a funny “how not to use this product” video for your Facebook page. This type of low-stakes engagement helps your customers get to know you and establish stronger customer relationships.

19. Be part of your community.

An aspect of having fun involves being actively involved in your community. Sponsor and attend local school and sports events, team up with other small businesses, and volunteer at local food pantries and shelters. Customers want to support small businesses–businesses that play an active role in the perpetuation of good in their community.

20. Use the right tools.

Implementing many of these tips without increasing your stress and your employee’s workload can be tricky. However, with the right tools, you can make phenomenal customer service a breeze for a team of any size starting at any level of customer service skills. That’s where Podium comes in.

Boost Your Customer Service With Podium

Podium helps over 150,000 local businesses and team members provide consistently excellent customer service by giving them the tools to:

• Collect and manage customer reviews from multiple channels in one place
• Send text messages to customers, enabling them to communicate quickly and easily
• Create a customized chat widget for their website, allowing customers to reach out for support or assistance