Customer Service Options for Your Small Business

Today’s consumers expect a great shopping experience, and they’re willing to keep searching until they find it. The challenge for most small businesses is deciding how to deliver that customer service, especially with limited resources. Consumers like a variety of customer service channels that extend onto the Internet, so businesses need to diversify if they want to win the customer service battle. 

Make Yourselves Available Online

It’s a risky move to ignore online customer service options. Many are inexpensive to implement and give customers a range of options to choose from. Email, for example, can be great for small businesses dealing with a low volume of customer service inquiries. An email address is free to set up and can be managed by current employees as questions come in.

Social media, meanwhile, provides another cheap venue for engaging customers and responding to customer service needs. Social profiles are free to set up on Facebook, Twitter, and other major networks, and they provide a direct connection with individual customers. Customers like using these public forums for posting about their experiences. Even negative experiences can be turned positive. When businesses respond adequately to complaints from customers, more than half of those negative reviewers revise their opinion and take a positive view of the company.

Finally, for small businesses managing larger client loads through their company websites, live chat is a customer service channel that’s growing in popularity among consumers. Live chat eliminates the lag time between filing a customer service inquiry and receiving feedback, and it’s also easier to fit in than calling a customer service number. Plus, it can significantly increase your conversion rates and improve customer satisfaction.

With a relatively inexpensive cloud service, integrating these customer service solutions is straightforward. Everything can be hosted on remote servers, freeing up real estate (and cash) for a company’s operations. Emails, chat logs, and company data can also be stored through cloud services to improve service levels.

Don’t Leave Customers Hanging

Whatever the customer service channel, speed should be the top goal of a business. Being personable and helpful are also critical to active customer service. Faster is always better, which is why immediate feedback through call centers and live chat are so highly valued among consumers.

Hire a Call Center at Your Own Risk

Call centers are one of the oldest and most common methods of delivering customer service, particularly on a large scale. But it comes at a very high price. Call center services can cost businesses about $1 for every minute a representative is on the line with a customer. If your call center averages 1,000 phone calls per month at an average of 10 minutes per call, you’re spending $10,000 each month just on your call center. That’s a considerable expense for any business, but small businesses will feel a particular strain in trying to afford this service.

As a result, many small and mid-sized companies are turning to more cost-effective channels. Plus, live-chat options provide a similar interaction as call centers while reducing handling costs by 80 percent. This means you can still deliver that one-on-one experience and personalized engagement without pouring money into a call center.