The facts are clear, small businesses can only survive when they successfully provide customer service. However, in the business of day to day operations, it can be far too easy to lose the thread on just how important it is to make sure that you are properly serving your customers. This is a shame, and can often have fatal consequences for a business. Your business should be constantly striving to improve its customer service. Here are three ways to do just that.

Get to Know Your Customers

One of the defining items of small businesses is that they have a close relationship with their customers. Most businesses have an outstanding relationship with 10-20% of their top customers. This statistic says a couple of things. First, businesses should do whatever they can to get to know their customers better, as a good relationship with customers helps to get more people into their stores. Second, 10-20% of their customers is a good number, but it may not be enough. Businesses should constantly be striving to build personal relationships with customers in order to better understand their needs and figure out ways of expanding their overall customer base.

Provide Better Ways to Communicate

Face-to-face interactions are important, but you can’t spend your entire day trying to talk to your customers – it is neither possible nor efficient. As such, make sure you are using as many communication platforms as feasible in order to talk with your customers. This may mean social media, email, texting, and more. Remember communication is key to providing good service, and service is key to your business. Furthermore, make sure your customers know they can use these communication platforms in order to talk to you and be served.

Train Your Staff

You would never expect any employee to properly carry out any function of their job if they weren’t appropriately trained. The same applies to customer service. It is vital that every business appropriately train their staff in a variety of areas in order to improve their ability to carry out customer service. This means staff should fully understand a business’s operations, how to get answers for a customer, and the appropriate way to deescalate a conflict.

Customer service is critical in any industry, but for a small business, it may be the thing that literally keeps your doors open and keeps customers from going to shop elsewhere. You should treat the provision of customer service with the highest priority.

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