If a customer has a bad experience, they will tell 10 people their entire online social network which could be more than 500 people. This means it has never been more important to protect the reputation of your brand and retain a happy and loyal customer base. More than ever your customer service is essential to the long term survival and growth of your business.

I’ve broken these tips down into two sections, tips for business owners and tips for customer service providers. The point being that the responsibility to provide excellent customer service often requires input from both groups.

Tips for managers and business owners

You wouldn’t teach a baby to swim by throwing it in a canal, and you can’t teach your staff to provide excellent customer services by waving a “top 5 customer care tips” reference sheet in front of them. If you are truly serious about providing excellent customer care, you need to think about your organisation from the top down. You can only expect your staff to provide excellent customer service if you provide an environment and framework where this is possible.

1. Reduce the need for customer service
   Customer service is not just the bit where people call you up and complain. Customer service is intrinsically linked with your brand, the quality of your products / service, the effectiveness of your communications and your meeting (exceeding) of expectations. The job of your customer services team is not to minimise sum of the money you spend on refunds, replacements or apologies, that’s the job of the people that deliver the service or make the products.
2. Create a culture of care and respect
   Excellent customer service cannot be faked. If your staff care about the customer, care about their own reputation, the reputation of their colleagues and that of the company, they are going to be more willing to work towards providing excellent customer service. Making staff care is not just about paying them more money, far from it. You create a culture of care by:
   • Demonstrating care yourself
     You change your children’s nappies because you care about them. Do you care enough about your business to get your hands dirty there too? The owners or management set the tone for the entire business.
   • Share the failures and successes
     Share the adventures of your business with your team. Tell them about the wins, the losses and the opportunities. Let your staff be a part of the development of the business and you’ll be amazed how much they really care.
   • Acknowledge the importance and contribution of everybody
     If your staff feel valued and respected, they will be in a better frame of mind to represent the company in a positive way.
   • Never criticise customers
     Not when you’ve just put the phone down. Not at lunch time. Not in the bar after work. It leads to a terrible culture of “stupid customers”. If it’s ok to mock some, why not mock every customer? Allowing a culture of criticising customers says “you only have to pretend to care”.
3. Unshackle your staff
   There is nothing worse than spending 45 minutes on the phone to somebody that “understands” your problem but unfortunately their “hands are tied”. What would happen if you put no limit on the action a member of your team could authorise to satisfy a customer? Do you trust your staff so little you don’t trust them to authorise an appropriate refund or replacement?
4. Generosity and competence
   The job of your customer service team is to ensure unhappy customers:
   • Become happy again
   • Spend money with you in the future
   • Don’t tell 500 friends not to do business with you

Companies spend thousands (even millions) on marketing. They pay for endorsements, adverts, fancy packaging and stationary, plush offices / stores, and then they spend minimum wage on customer services. Total lunacy. Even the smallest companies should allocate a significant amount of their marketing budget to customer retention, and in most instances, this starts with customer services.

5. Use technology to your advantage
   Avoid automation. When I phone, you get one opportunity to let me choose between 3 options. Any more than that and I start to hate you.
   If you have an answer machine, make sure it gets listened to.
   If you have an email address, make sure it is somebody’s job to monitor it regularly
   If you have a phone, make sure it is answered straight away
6. Make it easy for your customers to get in touch
   Who should I call, when are you open, what’s the number??? Make it obvious in all your communications.

Tips for customer service providers

1. Understand that customer service is an opportunity
   People don’t mind (reasonable) mistakes. They may approach you in an aggressive manner, but that’s often because they have received poor customer service too many times in the past. The best relationships are often formed when a customer gets to see how serious your business is about pleasing them. They are certainly the most memorable encounters and often inspire more confidence than flawless transactions.
2. Try to see things from the customers perspective
   Empathy is the most powerful tool at your disposal. Once you can put yourself in the customers shoes, their anger may seem more reasonable. A late delivery may be little more than a minor inconvenience to some customers, where it may have damaged the reputation of another customer.
3. Be sincere
   There is nothing worse than an insincere apology. If you truly care about your customers and your reputation, you will become sincere rather than just act sincere.
4. Remain calm and professional at all times
   Losing your temper means you have lost control. Once you lose control you are not acting in the best interests of yourself, your business or your customer. We all feel stupid after losing our temper, particularly when we find we are behaving irrationally with somebody who is calm and friendly. Let your customers do the “feeling stupid”.
5. You only “win” when the customer does
   The only victory to be gained is one where the customer feels satisfied. Avoiding a refund or compensation is often false economy.
6. Be confident
   If a customer makes a complaint, they have probably lost confidence in your company. Your job is to restore that confidence, and that process begins with establishing the customers trust and confidence in you. It’s hard to fake confidence, and you can’t become confident simply because somebody suggests you do, but there are things that will assist. If you take time to understand the business and the products or services you supply, you are well positioned to provide sound confident advice. You should also work on your eye contact and body language (beyond the scope of this article).
7. Be personal
   Use the name of your customer and try to build rapport. Let the customer know you are treating them as an individual and let them also see that the business has a human face. It’s much harder to be cross with people you like.
8. Give the person your complete and undivided attention
   No surfing the internet, reading a magazine, playing with blu-tak or answering “quick questions”. Let the customer know they have your complete and undivided attention.
9. Be honest and accurate
   Manage your customers’ expectations fairly. If you’ve screwed up once, the last thing you need to do is screw up again. If there is bad news, just give it to the customer straight. It will only come back to haunt you with vengeance if you create expectations that you fail to meet a second time.
10. Take responsibility and become accountable
    Always give your name, number and any other details that will enable the customer to come back to you to resolve this issue. Don’t make the customer repeatedly explain their circumstances to other people, and don’t palm people off. If you are not the person to fix this issue, then let it be YOUR job to act as the customer’s representative.
11. Make firm commitments and follow through
    When you put down the phone, or when the customer leaves, get to work delivering on any promises you make. If you can’t act straight away, put them in your calendar and write down everything you have agreed to do.
12. Be positive
    An angry customer may be pretty focussed on all the things that are wrong with your business, and your job is to counteract this with positivity. Try to concentrate on (and make clear) what you can do for the customer. A conversation about possibilities will take you forward much more quickly.

Of course not every business has a big customer service department, and the resource to answer the phone after 1 ring and provide large refunds. But every business can know what “excellent” customer services like, and can develop a culture that makes it possible.