Inexpensive Tools to Provide Extraordinary Customer Service for Your Home Based Business

Many home based business owners feel the tools to provide exceptional customer service is out of their reach. This is not true. Even the smallest company on the planet has access to everything they need to provide great service to their customers.

Great customer service isn’t necessarily simply about recognizing a name or voice nor having the most recent technology available. These are usually tools that are used and abused by most customers. There are great effective and inexpensive ideas that can be implemented with little or no effort and provide your customers with great service.

The number one contributing factor is the quality of service provided to people or customers. If you don’t have the right people or person to deliver quality service there isn’t a tool, manual or technique that will produce a company service superstar.

A great quality of service person is generally described as upbeat, genuinely motivated, enthusiastic, supportive, enabled with the power to make others happy, empathetic and informed. Get your customer service people or person in order before proceeding any further with procuring other tools related to exceptional customer service.

These are several really simple tools or techniques to make a customer service difference with your home based business;

Make strong response promises that you will always keep

Statements like “we will make every effort to return your email within two days” or “our orders are shipped within an average of three days”. These types of statements sound great, but are examples of non-commitment statements. No one likes the cable company giving a four hour window for service or repair. In fact, some customers are livid. Their entire day is ruined and if you need to do a follow up another day is promised to your cable company.

If you cannot make a serious commitment statement to your customers there is an obstacle in the way that is impeding providing exceptional customer service. Remove it and make your customer service shine.

Put you phone number prominently on your website

Believe it or not this small touch has received an overall positive response from customers. Successful companies such as Apple, Best Buy and Zappos performed this small change and their reviews and ratings were increased for customer service. Putting your phone number prominently on your website is even better for smaller companies such as a home based business. Smaller companies are seen as credible and more trustworthy when the phone number is on the website than those that don’t publish one. Customers have stated they appreciate the availability and convenience even if they sent an email instead of dialing a toll free number

If you happen to have a company where a phone number legitimately cannot be provided, don’t publish one. However, the majority of companies don’t have an excuse for not putting this information on the website where customers can find it.

Add a live chat feature to your website

A live chat is a wonderful way to allow customers to feel that what they have to say is important and you will be surprised at how many customers will use it. If you have several people or even a couple of people with your business that can monitor the site and answer questions and concerns provided by your customers you will see an advantage to adding live chat to your company’s website.

Several other advantages are received from live chat. You are readily notified of any downtime with your services or site as well as completing many inquiries at one visit rather than several emails or phone calls to service clients.

Make certain if your site doesn’t indicate live chat available someone is always there to provide this service.

These are great inexpensive tools to provide extraordinary customer service for your home based business.