3 Steps for Scaling Customer Service for Small Business

sense of responsibility for their organization’s quality of service. This is great news for their companies. It is crucial that everyone embraces the idea of quality customer service.

Making it a point to emphasize the importance of customer service to your employees and fostering a “culture of service” for all of your employees can yield benefits. One way to do this is to set an example from the top. When CEOs set an example by taking a turn on the customer service desk, for instance, they make clear to their organization that customer service is a priority.

3. Use tech where appropriate but not in place of human interaction.

Technology should help you better connect to your customers rather than replace genuine human interaction. That said, handling the volume of requests from an ever-increasing number of channels can be daunting.

Is it worth the effort? Reaching out to customers in a genuine way can create a bigger impact than you think:  Nearly nine out of 10 Dreamforce respondents (87 percent) said that a positive interaction with a customer support professional had positively changed their impression of a company’s brand. When tales of positive experiences are shared among friends, family, and colleagues, businesses stand to gain new customers.

Sometimes it’s just a matter of keeping track of all your customer requests so nothing slips through the cracks. Google’s suite of apps can come in handy when you can’t invest in a full-fledged help desk. You can use a bunch of workarounds to make Gmail work for customer support—tracking and labeling conversations so you can respond to them quicker, organizing bug reports, and providing support on the go using the mobile app. You can even use Hangouts to provide real-time support from right inside your browser without having to make a big investment.

When you have enough agents and tickets that you begin having trouble with collisions (more than one person responding to the same request), it may be time to look for a solution with an entry-level option to give you a central shared inbox.

Scaling customer service is a difficult feat for businesses of any size, but poor customer service is simply no longer an option. Cultivating customer loyalty is an essential priority for growing businesses, and small businesses that incorporate these lessons put themselves in a position to succeed.

---

Alan Berkson is director of community outreach at Freshdesk.

---

Related Articles

3 Steps for Rethinking Your Customer Relationships

In an increasingly transparent economy, value is key.