Make your customer service count
Take care of them, and they’ll take care of you.
Not long ago, I was wandering through a used bookstore and happened upon an old article in a magazine from the 1950s about customer service. Treasure trove! (OK, so, you have your quirks and I have mine.)
Some of the advice is still relevant today – greet customers by name, keep the store looking great, be sure to follow up. But some of it was – well, let’s be generous and call it antiquated: Men should have their wives press their shirts nightly, women should call customers sir and ma’am.
Needless to say, the rules of business have changed a lot since then and these days, customer service has taken a digital turn. What should your customer service look like today?
Wi-Fi: The best thing you can do
According to a recent small business survey by NETGEAR (a Wi-Fi provider with whom I used to do some work), one of the best things you can do to foster a great relationship with your customers is to offer, not just free Wi-Fi, but fast, free, secure Wi-Fi. Today, customers both expect and appreciate finding WiFi where they shop and do business.
The survey says the need for great Wi-Fi is growing. Nearly 44 percent of respondents said that their network performance had been impacted lately by increased congestion, begging the question: Why do these savvy small business owners offer free Wi-Fi in the first place? Nearly 70 percent said that making Wi-Fi available for their clients “improves customer service.”
What else can you do?
Review your reviews
Whether it is on Yelp, Google, an In- ternet forum, or some other platform, negative reviews can be the death knell for a small business. I know of a restaurant near my house in California that received so many bad reviews after a bad health inspection report that they had to close and reopen under a new name (and yes, with some new practices.)
The good news is that there is something that can be done about bad reviews: You can get them deleted. How? Customer service.
Who leaves bad reviews? Folks who have had a bad experience with your business, that’s who. Your job then is to fix the problem. If you contact the negative reviewer, sincerely inquire about the nature of the problem and work to resolve it, you will likely find that the customer will consider taking the bad review down.
As Bill Gates once remarked, “your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
The video library
Another digital idea for the digital age is to create a robust video library answering common customer questions. That’s what independent eyeglass retailer Warby Parker did when it decided that a Twitter feed didn’t really do the trick.
What about the simple and always effective art of written thank you notes? Yes, I know you are busy, and yes, you’re right, this is a column about digital customer service, so check this out: MailLift is an online letter-writing service that allows you to “set a template, select recipients, customize details” and then your handwritten letter, written by a real person, goes out and makes you stand out.
And what about using chatbots? This is an area where small business can learn a lot from bigger businesses. Chatbots are an easy, affordable way to interactively answer simple customer service questions.
And so yes, while customer service is decidedly digital today, the upshot is really no different than the advice in that old article I found – take care of your customers and they will take care of you.
Steve Strauss, @Steve Strauss on Twitter, is a lawyer specializing in small business and entrepreneurship who has been writing for USATODAY.com for 20 years. Email: sstrauss@mrallbiz.com. You can learn more about Steve at MrAllBiz.com.
The views and opinions expressed in this column are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of USA TODAY.