All companies are focused on increasing sales and building new sales channels, but sometimes offering great customer service gets ignored. Studies have shown that customer service is the third most important factor influencing a purchasing decision, ranking after confidence and quality. But sales won’t matter if the customer is quickly lost through poor customer service. The damage increases further when lost customers tell others about their poor experience.
So, what goes into having great customer service?
Great customer service starts with making sure everyone throughout your organization understands your customer’s needs and they are able to address them while exceeding expectations. Everyone needs to be prepared for the first time a customer or prospect initiates contact. Also, offering great customer service isn’t limited to just your “customer service team.” Every single person in the organization needs to believe in offering great customer service. Just as a quick example, a call may be misrouted and get to one of your engineers or someone on your finance team. How will they handle it? Think about it this way – everyone in your office needs to be prepared to interact when a customer contacts them. That can happen in your office, on the phone or outside of work – in a restaurant as an example.
We have been incredibly impressed with the way our portfolio companies have handled customer service throughout their organizations. Many of them like Art.com/AllPosters.com and ChannelAdvisor have built it deep into their culture and it has helped distinguish them from their competition. I asked executives at both of these companies for their thoughts on what makes great customer service.
ChannelAdvisor
ChannelAdvisor helps businesses of any size sell through many online channels. One of the channels they support is eBay. eBay is the largest online marketplace in the world processing almost $40 billion worth of merchandise through their site during just the second quarter this year alone! One of Ebay’stop concerns is making sure fraud is a very low percentage of their total transactions. However, sometimes legitimate merchants get caught in fraud checks and get shut down by eBay. Of course, this is a huge blow to the seller since they can get banned for 30 days, even if it is eBay’s mistake. Imagine a seller that gets banned during the busy holiday season!
ChannelAdvisor does an excellent job keeping their ears to the ground and when they hear about a merchant that has a problem, they call eBay immediately and do everything they can to get the seller’s business back online quickly. This shows how much ChannelAdvisor truly cares about the seller’s business - by going above and beyond to help them succeed. The best part? ChannelAdvisor does this for non-customers as well. Think of the impact! Of course, this is something the sellers never forget and always ends up being a positive for ChannelAdvisor in the long run.
Michael Jones, Chief Operating Officer at ChannelAdvisor offers the following “Five Tips for Great Customer Service” that he has implemented:
1. If you don't take of the customer someone else will
2. Listen to what your customer's needs are, not what you think their needs are
3. Learn your customer's language, it helps you speak to them and understand them better
4. Have everyone in your company spend time with customers, and I mean EVERYONE, they will learn so much about how to be successful that way.
5. See #1 it is the most important rule - if you don't learn it you will fail
Art.com
Art.com believes that great customer service comes from people that take customer service personally.
“Listening to our customers is not just one of the things we do, it’s a primary focus of ours – a happy customer is the ultimate return on investment for Art.com,” said Joshua Chodniewicz, Co-Founder and VP of Corporate Development of Art.com.
Recently, a distraught customer called Art.com after receiving a notice that they would be unable to fulfill an inspirational piece she was sending to a friend recently diagnosed with cancer. A representative from Art.com’s customer service team located the exact same item, paid for it with a personal credit card, and had it delivered on behalf of the customer.
Leanne Onstott, Customer Services Director for Art.com, shared with me the following Top Five Tips for Great Customer Service:
1. Desire to help others and solve problems to make things better.
2. Have excellent listening skills.
3. Demonstrate exceptional follow through.
4. Have the ability to express empathy.
5. Know who does what in the organization, so you can make a miracle happen when it is needed.
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