How to improve customer service: 10 helpful tips

“It’s easier to attract flies with honey than with vinegar” is an oft-repeated adage—one that reminds us that people respond better to a friendly demeanor than an aggressive one. It’s a saying that highlights the importance of effective and sympathetic communication, a skill that’s essential for all interpersonal relationships but is especially vital for a successful business.

It isn’t enough to have a great product. Companies must also nurture and cultivate customer relationships to ensure their product’s marketability. In fact, more and more companies and major brands have started to view exceptional customer service as an integral part of their business model.

But how do you ensure the best customer service experience?

If you’re ready to learn how to improve customer service but aren’t sure where to start, we’ve got you covered. Below we’ve outlined some customer service tips and tricks to ensure your clients receive the best experience possible.

1. Practice active listening

There’s nothing more frustrating for a customer than interacting with employees who don’t properly listen to their problems. This can result in the customer being transferred back and forth between customer service reps, leaving them with unsolved issues and a negative impression of your business. 

To ensure that this doesn’t happen, active listening is an essential customer service skill to practice. To do this:

• Be present: Put your phone and any other distractions aside.
• Ask Questions: Ask leading questions to fully understand how to best help your customer.
• Paraphrase: Repeat what the customer said in your own words to show you’re listening.
• Don’t interrupt: Show patience and respect by letting the customer speak.

2. Communicate honestly

When you promise a customer a particular solution, make sure you follow through. After all, the outcome of great customer service is partly psychological. The customer should be able to look back on the interaction feeling like they have been heard, knowing that they can rely on the company to honor its commitments in the future.

Additionally, when you’ve made a mistake, be sure to own up to it. It’s unavoidable—every customer support team makes mistakes here and there. When you try to cover up or deny mistakes, however, it can lead to frustration that only exacerbates your customer’s problems. 

Instead, be honest and authentic. This will result in a better overall experience for everyone involved and is a simple way to improve customer retention.

3. Go above and beyond

To exceed customer needs and expectations, you need to go the extra mile. To this end, you should always be looking for ways to optimize your customer communication. 

For example, if you can reduce the amount of time it takes the customer to contact key personnel or the number of formalities they have to go through, you can create a smooth experience that leads to efficient customer interactions. When you do things right, this makes the customer feel special, like a VIP—and it’s a feeling that few of us take for granted.

4. Be clear

Communicate clearly. When you give confusing or inconsistent answers, it leads to the breakdown of customer trust. To help prevent this, you need to make sure you’re speaking in a way that customers can understand.

Here are some ways to optimize your customer communication:

• Simplify your language: Avoid using industry jargon. Try to communicate using words that the average person will understand.
• Provide thorough answers: If you’re explaining a difficult concept, take your time and be patient. 
• Enunciate: Enunciation is a necessity in all scenarios, but especially over the phone.

5. Offer self-service options

Many customers are solutions-oriented. They are eager to quickly solve problems themselves before putting in the effort to get a customer service representative involved.

One way to help customers help themselves is to have a readily available FAQ section on your website. Compile a list of your most common customer questions coupled with concise, easy-to-understand answers. This way, you can help your customers without them even having to pick up the phone. 

As you create more self-service options, it might be tempting to automate more customer service processes. While automation can be helpful in some ways, be mindful of its pros and cons. 

For example, while chatbots are a great way to automate real-time answers to customer questions, they can also feel cold and impersonal. 

That said, you could always implement a chatbot in conjunction with your regular customer support team members. That way, if your team is unavailable for whatever reason, your customers still have access to a helpful resource.

6. Create a unique customer experience

To build customer loyalty, you want to connect with every customer on an individual basis. It’s those personalized, unique customer experiences that keep people coming back. 

Some ways to create a unique customer experience include:

• Personalizing orders
• Interacting with customers on social media
• Creating interactive content
• Offering discounts for loyal customers
• Communicating authentically with customers

Creating a unique customer experience goes hand in hand with integrating feedback. Listening to feedback will help you get to know your customers and any relevant pain points. From there, your goal is to empathize with their needs while using their suggestions to improve your business.

7. Be adaptable

When you respond quickly and appropriately to queries and complaints, it helps mollify angry customers and diffuse tension. That said, sometimes a tricky problem comes your way and it isn’t so easy to solve. 

In such situations, it’s important to remain adaptable. Here’s how to do so:

• Breathe: Even if your customer is frustrated with you, never panic. Stay calm and take a deep breath before searching further for solutions.
• Use teamwork: When you don’t know how to solve a problem, contact someone else on your team who might. 
• Take notes: Sometimes taking notes can help you visualize and deconstruct an issue, thereby helping you find a solution.

Being adaptable is also about optimizing and automating business processes when possible. For example, for reliable bookkeeping year-round, you may want to consider using QuickBooks Live.

8. Encourage customer feedback

The more customer feedback you integrate, the faster your business will grow. To optimize your company for customer satisfaction, you have to know what your customers want in the first place.

Collect customer feedback via:

• Online feedback forms
• Email surveys
• Phone calls
• Social media
• Suggestion boards

While it’s great to collect data on customer preferences, that data means nothing if you don’t act on it. Once you receive feedback, make sure to integrate it into how your business operates. 

If customers complain about a slow response time, for example, rethink your customer support processes. If customers complain about their interactions with your employees, you may want to invest in a good customer service training program. Incorporating feedback is key to creating the best customer service strategy possible.

9. Mind your manners

Oftentimes, people are made to feel like the company is doing them a favor by taking care of their product-related problems. This shouldn’t be the case. 

Instead, you should take pleasure in addressing customer needs. After all, without customers, your small business can’t succeed. Even just saying “please” and “thank you” is a demonstration of customer care. A warm and polite attitude can go a long way in making a good impression for your business.

10. Outline a customer journey map

To create a successful customer journey, it’s important to identify and map out important touchpoints. Once you visualize and break down the customer experience into different segments, you can slowly but surely optimize the way your business interacts with potential customers.

A customer journey consists of three main stages:

1. Awareness: In the awareness stage, customers don’t yet know about your business. They have a problem and are educating themselves, trying to figure out what they should do about it.

2. Consideration: In this stage, customers further understand their problems and start learning about different solutions. This is when a customer might start comparing and contrasting different products and services.

3. Decision: Finally, the customer is ready to make a decision. They now know how they’re going to solve their problem, so they just need to choose which product or service they’re going to use. 

In order to optimize your customer journey map, research is essential. You’ll want to create customer personas and determine existing customer pain points. This will help you empathize with your customers as they progress through each stage of their journey.

Ideally, you should have content created for each stage of the customer’s journey. For the awareness stage, you’re going to want to publish educational content targeting a customer who isn’t familiar with your product. 

In the consideration stage, your content should be more in-depth, featuring podcasts, expert guides, and product comparisons. Then, once your customer is in the decision phase, you want to provide content such as case studies and product trials.

Consider each stage of the customer’s journey and figure out where you can improve. Ideally, you want every interaction to guide the customer to the next stage, leading up to a purchase. 

Improving customer service in your business 

As technology continues to advance, one thing remains constant: The importance of great customer service. Whether you’re already established or starting a new business, solving customer problems should be a top priority. After all, it’s those strong customer relationships that are the basis of a successful company.

To create an excellent customer service team, you’ll need to make sure that you’re always implementing feedback and optimizing your internal communication processes. You may even want to implement customer relationship management (CRM) and accounting software so that your business can function more cohesively overall. Let QuickBooks handle all your bookkeeping needs so that you can focus on running your business.