What Is Customer Service?
Customer service is the support, assistance, and advice provided by a company to its customers both before and after they buy or use its products or services. Customer service is a critical factor in ensuring buyer satisfaction, retaining customers, and growing a business.
Benefits of Customer Service
There are many reasons why businesses should invest in good customer service. The following are just some of the main benefits of implementing a customer service program within a company:
Customer retention: The first and most obvious advantage of having a customer service plan in place is to keep customers happy. It means listening to concerns, being empathetic, and easing issues related to product availability, payment, returns, and technical support. Showing that a company cares keeps customers loyal.
Employee retention: Customer service isn’t just for customers. It also helps keep employees with the company. When customers are happy, employees are, too. Individuals tend to want to work for a business that cares about its customers.
Troubleshooting and problem-solving: Businesses have to take care of their customers’ problems. But companies that take a proactive approach tend to do better. This means that it’s important to reach out to customers before any issues arise. This shows that the company cares and is doing all that it can to ensure a smooth customer experience.
Referrals: Consumers who have a good experience usually pass on that information to others, whether that’s through word-of-mouth to people they know, customer reviews, or social media mentions. This often helps businesses generate new sales.
Brand boost: Businesses that show consumers they care through customer service help increase their brand equity. This also leads to more referrals and, therefore, an increase in sales.
Increased customer lifetime value: This refers to the relationship customer service helps establish and solidify with a single customer. When a company provides a single customer with good service, that person is more likely to add to the company’s revenue by remaining loyal and making more purchases.
Corporate culture: Customer service allows businesses to streamline their workflows and promote cooperation among different teams. This includes communication between agents and managers, technical engineers, and production teams. All of this is to help corporations achieve their goals of customer attraction and retention and increasing sales revenue.
Competitive advantage: Having a good customer service base sets a company apart from its competition. It boosts the business’s reputation and also increases its brand value by showing consumers and competitors that the business values the relationships it has with new and existing customers. (Grant, 2024).
Being able to identify the basics of customer service will help create a foundation for me to dive deeper into what customer service can be for the customer and overall business. This article talks positively about customer service, specifically with human representatives, and all of the benefits that it provides. The benefits listed mainly say that investing in customer service will keep the customers happy and in turn, help the business overall.
However, it had me thinking, what about the other side of it? What are the negatives to customer service with a human representative? Are there any? Can you really always keep a customer happy? Perhaps the negatives aren’t all necessarily negative, but actually just places that need more refinement in comparison to other?
While looking into the positives is imperative to researching all about customer service, pointing out the negatives can help bring to light the areas of improvement. Businesses are constantly growing and evolving, so their customer service should also.
References.
Grant, M. (2024, February 21). What is customer service, and what makes it excellent? Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/customer-service.asp
