Customer service is one aspect of business that is often overlooked by many owners and entrepreneurs – and at a high cost to them.

Many businesses lose revenue or even fail because they bring bad customer service experience to, well, their customers. Yes, sometimes this is the case even if the business’ products and marketing strategies are actually great!

There are many horror stories from customers where they contact a certain business, but receive a lousy customer service response; sometimes no response at all! There are many cases of stores filled with bad employees – usually at the front desks like the salesperson or cashier. That store becomes reputable for a lousy service that people began to stop buying to them.

That is also a horror story for the owner; as you would have seen, he or she will lose sales, and later, maybe even his or her business!

Customer service is as important in business as marketing (ads, social media, SEO), e-commerce solutions (fulfillment, shipping, warehousing) and the products or services being sold.

So, how do you improve your customer service? Here are 5 ways you can do that:

1) Be responsive (and polite)

Many businesses fail simply because they aren’t responsive enough.

You chat them on their Facebook page, but doesn’t reply to you. You email them; no answer. And worse, you call the number they gave in their business card; turns out it’s not available anymore!

Be responsive. If a customer reaches to you, talk to them. Answer them.

When you do respond to their queries, be polite enough. Being cheerful will also bring you somewhere.

Some businesses do respond, but in a dry, distant way. This is a good way of telling your customer, “I’m not interested in you, you can now go. Bye-bye!”

In other words, don’t be like that!

Be responsive, be polite, and have some charm and cheerfulness when you respond.

2) Manage your customer service team well

Most likely, you will not handle the customer service section all the time – at this point, if you’re business is grown enough, you’re probably not the one answering all queries by now.

So, it’s important to train your customer service team. You may know the importance of customer service, but your team probably doesn’t.

Let them know the importance of their job – to serve customers well – and, as with any human resource management is all about, give them the proper incentives to work well with you.

Assure your team that, should a fight happened between you and the customers, you’ll be fair and unbiased enough to see who’s at fault. The idea of “customer is always right” is simply wrong.

But just as the customer can be wrong, so is your employee. If one of your customer service rep is performing badly – he/she is lazy, slow, or worse, rude and impolite – be prepared to fire him/her. You can’t afford a bad rep!

Manage your customer service team wisely, and your business will last longer!

3) Handle angry customers well

This topic is worthy of another article, but for the basics, managing angry customers come to basic principles: patience, controlled temper (because you’ll be mad, too, or get emotionally charged) and a bit of apology and compromise.

Don’t argue with your customer, but stand firm on your ground.

Should the customer get angry at you for really no good reason at all, be prepared to walk out. You will lose him or her, but so what? You can focus your time and energy to good and reasonable customers than to that unreasonable angry one.

However, this should go without saying: be unbiased and be objective in your assessments. When someone lashes down on you, you’ll be emotionally charge for sure. When that happens, your judgment can be clouded, and hence your way of thinking – you can make lousy decisions that can be costly on your part.

So be patient, control yourself (keep calm and polite; don’t fight back), offer a compromise if possible, say sorry if things really went bad (sometimes it’s good to say sorry even if you know it’s not your fault to defuse the situation). If the customer is really unreasonable, leave him/her alone, but keep your cool.

4) Your e-commerce solution is customer service, too

Are you surprised by this? If so, number 5 will even surprise you. But for now, know that your e-commerce solutions is part of your customer service.

Yes, all that we do here – warehousing, shipping, tracking, delivery, fulfillment – are part of your customer service.

If you deliver late, it’s part of your customer service experience. You lost a customer’s product? That’s a bad customer service experience. Delivered a broken product? Another bad customer service.

That’s why here at Fulfillmen, we make sure you get those factors right – to help you give out the best to your customers.

And what is number 5?

5) Everything (or mostly everything) is customer service

Everything in a business, or mostly everything, is your customer service to the people who buy or would buy to you.

Don’t think of customer service only in terms of answering customers and how to deal with them when they buy at you; the packaging, website design (for online stores), shipping, etc., are all part of your customer service.

If you think that way, and apply these principles well, you’ll boost your business and probably even get ahead from your competitors!

Conclusion

Customer service is simply vital in any business. It will literally make or break your enterprise.

If you’re looking for ways to enhance your e-commerce solutions, we can help you here at Fulfillmen.

Fulfillmen is the best Chinese fulfillment center. We help e-commerce entrepreneurs from China and all around the world.

We work with e-commerce solutions, logistics, dropshipping, product sourcing, and many more. Just reach us out and we’ll help you with your needs! You can reach us out here.