The Importance of Customer Service
Marketing & Sales Promotion Techniques
When it comes to selling product, there are lots of companies who have great marketing departments. Selling product can be the easiest part of the process. Unfortunately, even the best of products has issues from time to time, and customers want to be able to have those issues resolved. That’s why having customer service ensures your customers have their issues resolved, but having great customer service ensures the customer will bring repeat business, but will also bring word of mouth business.
We’ve all heard the horror stories of people who called a certain computer company and were put on hold for 5 hours or longer. We may have even experienced some cell phone companies who really could care less about the customer experience. And some of the high profile customer service disasters at home improvement stores even made major headlines. All too often, companies simply want to get those dollars out of your back pocket or pocketbook and don’t care what happens to you after that. But between the customers who leave the company never to return and the bad press that keeps customers from coming in the first place, having bad customer service will eventually destroy a company’s bottom line.
However, having great customer service, where the representative has a “can do” attitude and is willing to go that extra mile for their customer actually helps the company bottom line more than a great sales team. While a customer may purchase items from the company, for instance, high end clothing, and they have a problem with size or shipping or even a quality issue, if they call back to the company and get those issues resolved, they’ll remain a loyal customer. If that representative goes the extra mile and not only gets the issue resolved but makes the customer happy and smile during the process, that representative has just ensured the customer will view the company in a positive way, even after a negative experience. That will bring word of mouth sales, which builds the company bottom line, even if there’s an initial cost to fix the issue.
There are lots of ways to have great customer service that don’t kill the bottom line. Having great customer service not only makes for a happier customer base, a happier group of customer representatives, but makes for a happier company overall. Sometimes that in and of itself does more for the bottom line than great sales can.