No matter if you are working from home (Yay!)or from an office (Oh well, it pays.), you want your business to be a success, right? Well, in my opinion, one of the major components of making your business a success is EXCELLENT customer service.
As I said before, one of the main avenues for gaining new business is through word-of-mouth. If a customer has a bad experience with your business, you will not have that benefit of word-of-mouth, at least not good word-of-mouth. So, do your best to keep your customers happy.
There are a few ways to do this. Most of these tactics are based on customer service.
- If you have a customer complaint, do your very best to resolve it. You may not always agree with the customer, but sometimes it is best to agree anyway and resolve the situation. Take a loss of you must. Hopefully, it will save you some trouble in the future.
- Ship out products or perform services as quickly as possible. It has been my experience that the sooner a customer receives a product, the better. If they recieve it earlier than expected, you make them very happy. If they have to start searching for their product, they begin to get aggrevated.
- Take returns if necessary and possible. It will save a lot of hassle in the longrun. Besides, you can hopefully resell the item. If not, you may be able to donate it or auction it for a small profit.
- Make it easy for returns. Have return labels if possible. The less hassle, the better.
- Let customers know by email when you have received their order, when products have been shipped, and let them know how to contact you if they do not receive it.
- Always respond to emails/questions (nicely). I do not understand businesses that have email, but they never respond to it. This is a huge annoyance. It also shows that I probably don't want to conduct business with you.
A good rule of thumb is to always consider how you like to be treated when you are the customer. Try to see things from the customer's point of view. If you still don't agree with the customer, try to save yourself a lot of hassle, and try to make the customer happy.
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