When thinking about customer service, you probably are focusing more on the actual conversations with customers or ensuring you have a plan in place to help them throughout their buying journey with your small business. However, customer service is more than just the face-to-face interactions or the emails you send to customers and the help you provide when customers have questions or problems. To make your customer service efforts better than ever, we encourage you to look at other areas of customer service that you may have not considered.
Customer Centricity
Did you know that “only 14 percent of marketers say that customer centricity is a hallmark of their companies, and only 11 percent believe their customers would agree with that characterization”? Denise Lee Yohn (@deniseleeyohn) kicks off her article, “6 Ways to Build a Customer-Centric Culture”, on Harvard Business Review (@HarvardBiz), with this statistic from the CMO Council. This is an alarming statistic when you sit and think about it because customers are the key to any business success. Yohn outlines six actions small business owners should take to work on making customer service a key part in their culture.
Good Customer Service – Online and Off
According to Steve Strauss (@SteveStrauss), there is good news about bad online reviews: you can get them deleted.
In his USA Today (@USAToday) article, “Be Impeccable With Customer Service and Stand Out, Online or Off”, Strauss states, “Who leaves bad reviews? Folks who have had a bad experience with your business, that’s who. Your job then is to fix the problem. If you contact the negative reviewer, sincerely inquire about the nature of the problem and work to resolve it, you will likely find that the customer will consider taking the bad review down.”
With so many consumers conducting business both online and in person, it’s important to have customer service strategies to satisfy both groups – and you may find the two cross over more frequently than you imagined.
How to Make Cross-Channel Marketing Work
“Recognizing and understanding your customers is the first step to creating a winner customer experience – because it never makes sense to treat people like strangers when you know them.” Earlier this month, Karl Wirth (@wirthkarl) ended his article, “It’s 2019. Stop Treating Customers Like Strangers”, on Entrepreneur (@Entrepreneur) with this thought. Throughout the article, Wirth uses personal examples of how cross-communication with customers is important when running a business. Businesses should be able to track the various ways a single customer is accessing their site for information and target the messaging accordingly. For Wirth, this came up when he was researching basketball hoops from various retailers and searched between desktop and his mobile device, and at no point did the retailer connect it was the same consumer searching for basketball hoops. No help was offered, and after his purchase the emails had no personal connection to basketball – they were just generic emails regarding his purchase.
How SurePayroll Practices Customer Service
At SurePayroll, we know that customer service is important and strive to provide multiple options to our customers and let them know we are always here to help. In fact, we received the 2017 Silver Steve Award for Back-Office Customer Service Team of the Year in Financial Services, for our dedicated customer service efforts. When dealing with the complicated nature of payroll and taxes, if you’re looking for a payroll provider, it’s important that they stand out from the competition and are there to help you.
Here at SurePayroll, small business is our business. We are always working to create and share content that can help small business owners like you. Check back every Friday to get some light reading in before the weekend hits.
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This website contains articles posted for informational and educational value. SurePayroll is not responsible for information contained within any of these materials. Any opinions expressed within materials are not necessarily the opinion of, or supported by, SurePayroll. The information in these materials should not be considered legal or accounting advice, and it should not substitute for legal, accounting, and other professional advice where the facts and circumstances warrant. If you require legal or accounting advice or need other professional assistance, you should always consult your licensed attorney, accountant or other tax professional to discuss your particular facts, circumstances and business needs.
