What is customer service?
It is the act of catering to your customer’s needs. The best way to do this is to provide and deliver high quality professional service and assistance to your customers during and as well as after the sale of the product. Customer service is all about meeting the needs of your customers on time. It is all about maintaining ongoing client relationship, which is the key to continuous revenue.
Why is it important?
There are 2 popular sayings in the Service Industry :
“CUSTOMER IS GOD” and “THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT”
While one may not completely agree literally with the above lines but at the same time it is also true that business exists because the customers exist. Customers are the backbone of the service industry. Customer happiness is directly proportional to the goodwill as well as the revenue of any service based business and that is why customer service plays a very vital role in the success of a business.
Now one must think that “Is it easy to keep the customers happy?” The answer is “NO, it is not easy to keep the customers happy and satisfied all the time”, but, one must aim to keep them as happy as possible by making sure that all the resolvable customer queries are resolved on time. Always remember that:
How to actually provide exceptional Customer Service?
There are a lot of ways to make your Customer Service exceptional but the most important out of all is how well and quick you respond to the customer’s problem. Providing a solution obviously should be the main goal but how fast you provide that solution makes or breaks the customer’s trust and experience. If the customer is facing some issue, it is upto the customer service unit to make sure that his issues are registered and resolved as soon as possible.
How important is Promptness in Customer Service?
I would like to explain the importance of promptness in customer service through an example.
Let’s say Mr. Albert was facing some issues with his Television and he registered his complaint with the Customer Service Unit of the company named, XYZ, he purchased his Television from. Now Mr. Albert was promised that the issue will be resolved within a week, but, despite him reminding the concerned team, the issue did not get resolved even after ten days. At last Mr. Albert lost his patience and wrote an email to the higher authorities threatening them to take his case to the court.
After the email, his complaint was resolved within three days, but, in this case they clearly lost the customer’s trust. Mr. Albert wasn’t satisfied with the services of XYZ. The untimely response from the customer service unit resulted in customers dissatisfaction. If only XYZ was a bit more proactive and quick they would have had not only won over the customer’s trust in them but would also have been awarded with positive word of mouth publicity.
Yes. Timing is everything in Customer Service. Even if you have no readily available answer to the customers query you can at least let him know that you have heard him and you will definitely try and get his issue resolved. More than the answer the customer is looking for an assurance that he is being heard and that he is important. As long as the customer gets time to time replies he will be happy. A quick response to a customers query is a sure way to turn his frown into a smile.
