10 Ways to Show Respect to Your Customers pt.1

Getting customers to love your company is a hard thing to do. However, it is not impossible.

Except for the quality of your product, the next most important role in your company’s success is played by the customer experience that it provides. Your customer service department should be an well-oiled machine, but great customer experience should be a primary object for every department in your company. Because the customer experiences your company horizontally – across all departments and the customer service doesn’t happen neatly across all of them. And if you want your customers to feel good every time they make business with you and your company you should respect them. That’s all it takes.

So what we are going to give you here is not some creative loyalty programs you can use to make customers stick or some great examples for offers that will get you more clients. What follows is a list of hard work and actions that must be done in order to show customers you respect them.

Do these for a while, get help where you need some (from a professional customer service company for example) and the results will come, sooner than later:

1. Eliminate the obstacles – most companies never think about it, but for the customer, their customer service is kind of like an obstacle course – it is difficult for clients to understand who to call and who to talk to and they jump through hoops just so they can get some help. The customer interaction should be executed seamlessly, but often there is a discontinuity in the whole experience, where there is an organizational error. Ok, sales sell the product, operations should deliver, but they don’t have the full information and sometimes mistakes are made. And when this happens, who should the customer call – Sales, Operations, Customer service? And there you have your personal Bermuda triangle where so many customers “disappear”. So, simplify the roadmap for your customers, make it clear for them how they can do business with you the way that suits them, not only you;

2. Quit transferring customers to other departments – we all know how unpleasant and frustrating it is to call the customer service of a company and explain your problem from beginning to the end just to get transferred to another rep from another department that will “take care of your problem”. And then you have to explain the problem again. Sometimes you get transferred again. And again. Until you quit doing business with this company.

The solution is a customer service that can take care of problems by itself without passing the customer from department to department. Professional companies that provide customer service as a service to businesses are trained in this manure, so hiring one is a good idea;

3. Give customers a choice – providing customer with the “opt-out” option means providing them with a fake choice, when it comes to collecting mails for your mailing list. Give them some options about the newsletter they can receive – new products, news about the company, good promotions etc.;

4. Give a better structure to your website – often, corporate websites are like a Frankenstein’s monster – different parts created by each company’s division. The terminology differentiates from part to part, the menu and the logic for getting around the site are unclear and sometimes confusing. The information is inconsistent, even the design may vary from area to area.

Figure out collectively what the message of your website is, what your customers need from it and how you can make it deliver brand experience online.  Then create a structure that is organic and comfortable for the customer.

5. Consolidate phone numbers – even now, when technology is so advanced, there are still companies that provide their customers with a labyrinth of phone numbers which they need to navigate in order to talk to someone who can deal with their problem. This is a result of different departments and operations that get their own number to serve their customers.

Again, get together, make a list of all the numbers and cut most of them from it. Then let your customers know about it.
A single phone number for customers to contact your customer service is the best way to make things easier and show respect;

What do you think about these tips? Do you think you can handle all the hard work and implement them in your business? Contact us and share your thoughts, we can help you get the best of your customer service.

See you in the second part of our article.