Manage your customer service
Understand your customers better
Guide
Providing a high level of customer service means finding out what your customers want. Once you have found your most valuable customers, you can target them with higher levels of customer service.
Collect information about your customers
Information about your customers and what they want is available from many sources, including:
- their order history
- records of their contacts with your business - phone calls, meetings and so on
- direct feedback - if you ask them, customers will usually tell you what they want
- changes in individual customers' order patterns
- changes in the overall success of specific products or services
- feedback about your existing range - what it does and doesn't do
- enquiries about possible new products or services
- feedback from your customers about things they buy from other businesses
- changes in the goods and services your competitors are selling
- feedback and referrals from other, non-competitive suppliers
- social listening - track and analyse conversations on social media
- website tracking tools - using programmes such as Google Analytics
Manage your customer information
You must draw up a plan about how customer information is to be gathered and used. Establish a customer-care policy. Assign a senior manager as the policy's champion but make sure that all your staff are involved.