Benchmark Business Group

Is It Time To Take A Critical Look At Your Customer Service?

August 10, 2021

How great is your customer service? It’s easy to assume that you’d know if your customers weren’t happy. In today’s world of instant reviews, surely if a customer wasn’t happy, you’d know, right?

And while customers that are not happy are more likely to speak up, that doesn’t mean that all unhappy customers will speak up. Some will even continue to shop with your business, but that doesn’t mean your customer service doesn’t have room to improve.

The truth is that many businesses are out of touch with their customer service. They assume that because they don’t have many negative reviews everything is fine. However, customer service isn’t just about avoiding negative reviews. It’s about understanding what you do right, where you can improve, and sometimes finding hidden gems that your customers value but that you’ve always overlooked.

This week we challenge you to look for ways to truly baseline your customer service. Try these three suggestions to baseline your customer service:

  • Send out a survey. It’s best to send out anonymous surveys that are short and easy to fill out. Too often customer surveys are too hard to complete, and customers simply don’t have the time to respond. When it’s simple and easy to complete you’re likely to get more responses. And if they’re anonymous the information you receive is likely to be more accurate.
     
  • Look for points in time that you can ask your customers about the service that they are receiving. You don’t always have to ask your customers questions with a survey. Instead, you can ask them within day-to-day transactions. This could be when they are completing their purchase, a short time after they buy from you, or even when they are shopping. If you have an ongoing relationship with your customers look at how often you should be asking for feedback.
     
  • Ask your team. Your employees, especially those in customer service, hear when customers are unhappy, frustrated, or even just slightly annoyed. They see the day-to-day barriers that get in the way of great customer service. And they probably have ideas about what could help make the service even better.

It’s critical to note that before you begin to work on customer service it’s important that you have a workplace culture in your business that allows for great customer service. It doesn’t work to have your team ask customers about service or to offer their own feedback if they don’t feel like they can speak freely. If they feel like they’ll get in trouble for speaking up or that you won’t hear their ideas, then that’s the first problem you need to solve.

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