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Improving Customer Service with Small Business Communications

Customer service is more important now than ever before. Many businesses have lost their customer service focus in favor of improving their bottom line. If you can maintain a high level of customer service, it can be a serious competitive advantage for your business. I’ve heard it said that if you take care of your customers, you won’t have to worry about anything else. While there are other factors that come into play for successful businesses, at a high level this is certainly true.

One thing we pride ourselves on as a small business is personal contact with our customers. If you call our office, you are going to reach a human. While there are times when our callers go to voicemail, we try our best to route calls to the intended recipient instead of a machine. The ability to reach real people through communications is a huge advantage for small businesses. We recently polled our customers to find out which methods they prefer to use to contact our company for support. The primary contact method was via telephone – 92% – a huge majority. While customer support has moved online and into social media channels, people still want to talk to people when they have a problem. And the bigger the issue, the more they want the help of a real person.

Using Technology to Improve Response Time

• Unified communications
• Find Me – Follow Me
• Selective Call Forwarding
• Mobile Applications

The more quickly you can respond to your customers, the more likely they are to call you the next time they need your product, service or assistance. Therefore, it would make sense to make it as easy as possible to be reached. Like most small business owners and managers, you likely spend a portion of your day in the office, while also hitting the road to visit with prospects, clients, vendors and other business contacts. Unified communications now allows you to more quickly receive your voicemail, email, instant messaging, etc while out of the office. What if you want even tighter integration? Features such as simultaneous ringing, find me / follow me and selective call forwarding allow you the ability to stay in touch with all or a select group of your preferred contacts no matter where you are in the world. Much of this improved customer service is tied to centralized call management, which was discussed in another recent article.

These features are now more available to small businesses than ever before. Many of these advanced features and more can be found in current hosted offerings that cost the same or less than a traditional analog telephone lines of the past. The flexibility of such offerings is staggering. We are now able to design call flow routes that are far more advanced than ever before, yet easy to manage by an administrator. These call routes are highly customizable to your business needs and can provide you with a technological advantage to your customer service needs.

Technology should always assist in the execution of your existing business processes and never be a hindrance.  When it comes to customer service within your business, these are just a few of the technologies that can be implemented to make your business more efficient.  To have your current implementation analyzed at no cost to your organization, click below to reserve your free communications consultation today.