Are you worried about unhappy customers? Read on to study some valuable customer service essentials that will overturn the situation for you.
The quality of customer service can make or break your business. That’s primarily because it directly deals with customers, leaving them either happy or dissatisfied at the end of the day.
Your product or service might be delivering incredible value and solving the most complicated problems for clients, but if the customer is not treated with respect or their questions aren’t addressed on time, you’ll easily lose them to a competitor. In the worst-case scenario, an unhappy customer will rate your brand poorly and share negative feedback on social media or review platforms like Yelp, hurting your brand image as well as the ability to capture potential clients.
To avoid such issues, follow these customer service tips from a local business consultancy service:
Staying Proactive
Before anything else, it’s important to understand that customer service extends beyond answering customer queries and resolving client issues. The highly competitive business environment of today, in which customers have readily available information and a lot of choice, requires you to stay proactive instead of being responsive. 
This means you must act before you actually receive a query or complaint from a customer. This might involve following up with a social media user who recently posted a query about a product or service you sell or tracking a site visitor’s navigation activity or behavior to display relevant product suggestions or information on your website.
High Responsiveness on Social Media
Most companies do well in handling queries received directly through calls, emails, or website chat tools, but they tend to overlook social media complaints.
Given the massive reach and penetration of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc., you just can’t afford to see your reputation decline on any of them. What if the query you ignored or missed had come from a social media influencer with thousands of followers? If that happens, it will only take one negative feedback by them to destroy your brand reputation.
To avoid this, you should keep checking your social media messages, comments on your posts, and other engagements by users regularly and address them timely and appropriately.
Listen and Don’t Argue
When voicing a complaint, the first thing a customer wants is to be heard. Even if the problem is obvious, allow the customer to finish. Avoid interrupting, making excuses or ridiculing their concerns when they’re speaking. Let them know that you’re listening and trying to understand their situation. Gather all the important information before ending the conversation.
A customer might be screaming at the top of their lungs, but you must stay calm and leverage empathy to resolve the problem they’re faced with.
While customer service is a massive topic, focusing on the three tips stated above should greatly enhance the service quality of your business.
