Customers fuel a business. Without them, running a trade will be useless. Now, customer service is key to ensure a business keeps going, a business becomes successful, and eventually the same business running year over year over year.
The question now will be all about how you would go about making a customer feel welcome. There are variety of ways to get to the heart of most clients but there can only be some that would work.
Some pro tips would be ideal to get a business stable and afloat. These might be some of them.
Warm Smile
Nothing beats a friendly smile plastered on employees’ faces from the moment a customer comes through the entrance up until he or she leaves. It is pretty welcoming and it is sometimes enough to make a sale or close a deal. Having grumpy and scowling people working in a business establishment is simply an annoying scene to witness and most of the time, it drives customers away.
Relaxed Visibility
While it is sometime not a good idea to lurk around random buyers in a shop for instance, a relaxed visibility would be a nice idea.
Just in case a customer would have questions about sizes, available colours, or another design, a visible help would be a relief. This is being visible without being too pushy, and customers are looking for this type of customer service more and more.
Round-the-clock Assistance
Real-time customer service assistance is ideal but after sales customer service is also as important. This is to ensure that the customer returns for a similar transaction, or another transaction related to the first.
Thus, whenever the need arises, a round-the-clock hotline for immediate and important queries would be best. Big and small companies alike must have a medium where any customer can get a hold of and have an issue resolved.
First Name Basis
A personalized business interaction between clients and business frontliners can start by first names. If it’s possible for a business owner or employee to address clients by their first names when dealing with them, it would be a good strategy to make them feel welcome. Communication will then become very easy.
Personalized Token
Whenever possible, a small memento can make a customer feel welcome, when this is given at any time of the day. It is for this reason that companies prepare small stuff like pens, pins, or even a notepad, just to show they are welcoming a client like that.
If the token can bear the company’s name on it, which it normally has, it would be a great deal in terms of taking the customer feel welcome to the next level.
Magic Words
More than making the customers feel welcome by addressing them with their first names, using the magic words like “Please” and “Thank you” has never ran out of tune in terms of getting the attention of the clients.
Doing business with companies who are polite and respectful is always a pleasing experience. That, and the manner of talking to the customers, always do the trick.
Welcome Drink
For clerical businesses like real estate or insurance, a welcome drink such as water, coffee, or tea would keep customers interested.
Making the prospects feel at home and entertained by getting them something to get themselves busy while waiting is but a good business etiquette.
Comfortable Seat
If you can’t accommodate your clients right away, at least keep them comfortably seated. That will be a welcoming gesture to keep them at bay while you are still with someone else.
This is why most offices and business establishments normally have a sofa or a duvet located near the entrance of shops or around the information stalls. This is one sure way of welcoming clients.
Polite Staff
Talking in a behaved and cool manner, a customer can tell if the employees are trained well. Making customers feel important and welcomed is best done by having employees politely talking to them, in a way that a professional customer service experience is supposed to be.
Staff learned from the way an employer deals with clients. Training is best conveyed when the leader shows the same. When the boss is polite, it is likely that the same attitude will be forwarded to the workforce.
Constant Updates
For issues that requires follow-up or any unfinished business, constant updates from the business owner’s end would at least make the customers feel they are welcomed and deal with accordingly.
A regular update and follow through every now and then is one way to show they are not ignored at all, unlike some other businesses where customer service staff are either rude or condescending. When you make it a habit, being the business owner, this is a surefire way of a good business idea.
Immediate Support
Have you experienced calling for customer service to ask about any purchase or any deal you have had a while back but you cannot get a hold of anyone? This is so unwelcoming. How about you dialing a hotline which will take you time to redial and go through automated system before you can have a live customer service on the other line.
Being an entrepreneur, you should get away with it. Have an immediate support. Let a quick assistance be available at any time and you will see more businesses pouring in.
Thank You Card
Printing a few of those little “thank you” cards and have someone hand them out to every visitor who comes in your shop or company premises and anyone would feel welcomed.
Going through the extra mile by putting in an effort with small business details such as this has been proven to be quite a tickle among those customers who are undecided yet during the first visits. Chances are, once they feel more welcomed, the customers will likely be back for more business.
