No one likes to encounter bad customer service. With the dislike of bad service being unanimous, no one would provide anything but excellent service, right? Unfortunately, this is not the case. It would seem that more businesses than you think provide less than superb customer service.
If you are thinking of starting up a business of your own, you are likely wondering what you could do to avoid being labeled as having bad customer service. There are a few key things that businesses do that make their service undesirable by their customers and they may not even realize they are doing it.
The first thing that a lot of people do is answer their cellphone when they are in noisy environments. This is a big complaint from many people. If you are in a noisy area such as a mall or restaurant, don’t answer business calls. It leads to you looking unprofessional. The best way to avoid this is to get an answering service to handle all of your calls. If you do this, all of your calls can be set to be forwarded during times when you probably shouldn’t be trying to conduct business.
To go along with the whole answering the phone thing, the majority of professionals don’t usually answer the phone themselves. They normally have a secretary who does that for them or they utilize an answering service like we talked about earlier.
Another mistake that is made by a lot of people is that they set all their calls to go straight to voicemail. Nothing is more annoying than trying to get a hold of someone to inquire what may be very important information to the customer, and getting a recording prompting you to leave a message. Unless it is absolutely necessary, do not do it!
Answering services with a menu should only be used if you are the president of a monstrous company that has dozens of different departments. People don’t like having to sit through a lengthy automated service rattling off departments and numbers one after another just to get to the end and realize that it took so long that they have forgotten what they need to tell you.
Last but not least, make sure that if you do indeed go with an answering service that the recordings are clear and easy to understand. Don’t make your messages too long and whoever records the messages speaks clearly. The best test is to call the service yourself and give it a listen. Tweak it until it is perfect and remember to change messages as things in your company change in order to keep customers up to date. Follow these few tips and you should never find yourself labeled with bad customer service, unless you or your staff is rude in person, but that’s another story. Good luck with all of your future endeavors.