Ways to Humanize Your Customer Care

In a busy world, businesses are expected to provide some form of customer service 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Your customers are busy, and they don't want to settle for poor customer service from some robotic answering service. How can you keep your customers happy and provide great customer service every day? Here are some customer care tips that will help keep your customers coming back for more.

Get Social

Interacting with your customers on social media platforms is an easy way to keep in contact with your customer base and catch any complaints before they have time to develop into full-blow disasters for your business. Your social media platforms offer an alternative way for customers to seek help or ask questions and have them answered quickly.

Twitter and Facebook are already a part of your customer's everyday life, so making yourself available via these makes life a little easier for your customers and makes for great customer service opportunities.

Don't Automate Your Customer Service

Just because you offer 24-hour-a-day automated customer service doesn't mean you are providing the type of service that your customers appreciate. Skip the robotic answering systems and utilize other methods that allow your customers to reach you. Online, real-time chat agents and call centers that operate around the clock let your customers speak to a live person instead of a machine.

There are just too many options for live customer service available to businesses to justify using automated customer service techniques, so make these a last resort if you want to keep your customers happy.

Provide the Type of Customer Service You'd Want to Receive

Train your front-line employees to see your customers for what they really are — a crucial part of your business's success. Make sure that you are providing the type of customer service experience that you'd like to receive. This is as important for employees who answer the phones as it is for those who deal with your customers face-to-face.

Would you like to be kept on hold for five full minutes while waiting for someone to solve your service issue? Your customers wouldn't like it, either. It can be easy for your staff to forget that angry customers aren't the enemy, especially if they deal with them daily. Train your staff to recognize your customers' needs so they can help create the best customer experience possible.

The world is getting faster and smaller, and it's easy to lose the human touch with your customer service solutions. However, if you prioritize your customer care, you'll find that you have customers who are happy to continue to do business with you for a very long time, simply because they feel cared for.

Photo Courtesy of Stuart Miles from Freedigitalphotos.net