As a one-person show, you’re responsible for running your business, bookkeeping, marketing and customer service. Knowing some tricks to improve customer service can increase client loyalty and keep them coming back to you over competitors. They may even refer you to others, helping your company grow.
Customer service requires a lot of forethought about policies and brand personality. Without your customers, your business won’t succeed. If you don’t already make their happiness a top priority, now is the time to embrace some changes.
How Can Small Businesses Improve Customer Service?
At times, it’s hard to define what a solopreneur is. Some hire contractors but still don’t have any employees, for example. Entrepreneur attempted to define and count them in a recent article. They reported in 2019, the Small Business Administration stated 50.7 million businesses were small, which they defined as under 500 employees. However, 81% of the companies lumped into the number were solopreneurs simply added to that category.
The things a solopreneur does to improve customer service is going to differ from what a brand with employees does. Fortunately, there are plenty of tips to single owner entities to ramp up their efforts to keep clients happy. Here are our top suggestions.
1. Know Your Clients
Before you can offer exceptional service, you have to know your customers and understand their needs. Take the time to list out any complaints you receive. Survey your customers and ask them what you can do to improve their experience.
Try to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. What would make things faster, easier or better? Always run ideas past your loyal fans before implementing them as not everyone will enjoy changes. Be flexible. If something you implement isn’t well-received, either change it or nix it and move on to the next idea.
Looking to improve your customer service? Try to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. What would make things faster, easier or better? Click To Tweet2. Interact With Customers
Customer engagement matters and can keep a customer with you even if they consider leaving. Studies show it takes about 4.2 contacts with a company before they solve a customer’s problem. If you communicate frequently, you’re more likely to keep communication open and solve issues before they become problems.
3. Get Personal
Try to find better ways to engage your customers. One thing is to make interactions personal. Install cookies on your website to track past behavior and offer them shopping suggestions based on what they’ve bought or looked at.
An excellent example of this type of personalization is used by Amazon. When a user lands on the page, they’re invited to login. They are greeted by name and see past viewing, specials and suggestions based on data stored about them.
4. Be Present
Creating work/life balance while still serving your customers’ needs isn’t an easy task for one person. How can you be there for them while still maintaining your sanity?
Start by making a list of what constitutes an emergency and when you should respond immediately. For example, if you create websites and a client messages you that their site is down, that’s an emergency. However, if they like the color blue better than the green they requested and want a logo change, it can wait until the next work day.
If you define what an emergency is, you’ll create a good balance where clients know they can count on you when it really matters but also respect your off time.
5. Measure the Experience
Research shows about 30% of consumers would pay a little more if they knew they’d get excellent customer service. One of the best ways to ensure buying from you is everything they desire is by mapping the customer experience.
Consider all the touchpoints where you interact with people. Is there anything that you can improve at each juncture? Ask your customers what frustrates them the most and fix it.
6. Automate Tasks
As one person, you only have so much time in the day. You can have the best intentions of interacting one-on-one with clients, but as your company grows you simply won’t have time to. Fortunately, you can automate many things involving customer service and free up your time while making the experience better for your customers.
Start with a chat bot to talk to people who have a problem. A chat bot can collect basic information and find out what the problem is before referring them to you for a solution. You can program the bot with your frequently asked questions and solve many problems without a need for your intervention.
You can also automate many customer relationship management (CRM) tasks with CRM software. Set the program to message people on their birthdays. Run reports on buying behavior and segment your audience. You can then send out a note when a new product arrives and send it only to those who might be interested.
Think about any repetitive tasks you do in a day and see if there is a software solution to take some of the workload. The more time you free up for things a computer can’t do, the more you’ll improve your brand image.
Did you know? You can program a chat bot with your FAQs and solve many problems without a need for your intervention. Click To TweetAsk for Input
As a solopreneur, you’re used to doing everything on your own. Don’t be afraid to ask for input from others about how you can improve processes and procedures. Find a mentor who has walked the path of a solopreneur and have them audit your practices and offer advice.
The more information you have, the easier it will be to improve your customer service tenfold or more. Stay on top of the problems and you’ll automatically get better feedback. Positive feedback leads to higher sales and more referrals.
Ciao,
Miss Kemya
