The interaction your customers have with your company directly impacts your bottom line. When they have a bad experience they’ll eventually stop being loyal to your brand. Since this is obviously paramount to your brand’s success, it’s time to start thinking about how your business phone system can help you interact better with them.
Strive to Stand out From Your Competition
Regardless of where you look within your niche, you’ll find that competition is fierce. This doesn’t mean you should succumb to it though. Instead, you must find a way to stand out from the crowd so that your target audience chooses to buy your products or services instead of buying theirs. Good customer service over the phone is vital here and it all starts with investing in an office phone system – something that will pay off tenfold once your current and potential customers realize how easily they can get a hold of you, especially in comparison to other businesses in your industry who don’t have these phone systems in place. With these other companies, customers are forced to succumb to the waiting game – either being placed on hold for lengthy periods of time or waiting for a response to their email. Sometimes neither of these methods work and they’re subjected to finding their answer strictly through an “elaborate” FAQ that the company promises will answer all your questions, but really doesn’t.
One of the best ways to stand apart from the crowd is with a great business phone system that keeps you from passing customers from employee to employee while they’re sitting there waiting for an answer to their question or concern. With a good phone system you’ll have an auto attendant who will help you efficiently route your customers to the appropriate party the first time. This helps them get the answer they need much faster. VoIP phone service isn’t only great for this reason, but also because it enablesyour employees to be anywhere (even outside of the office) and still make and take phone calls for work. This helps your office run more efficiently, which will make your customers happier. Of course, you’ll also be happier because your bottom line will increase.
Always Put Your Best Foot Forward
Gov Loop says you simply can’t overlook the fact that the right phone system really will help you provide higher quality service for your customers. This is because there’s something to be said about a company that’s always available to answer their customers’ questions and address their concerns instead of limiting your customer service hours to a select few when customers typically aren’t available to handle business or worse yet, strictly relying on the internet to address these things. Either of these could potentially lose you a lot of customers.
In today’s world, customers want answers now. They don’t want to wait. As such, you need to do everything within your power to make yourself available to them on the phone. Making them wait for an email response or to see you in person simply won’t work. By having the right phone system in place, you’ll have two key advantages over your competition here:
- You’ll show your customers that you’re flexible. This is important for all companies – even those that are always on the go, with employees spanning the globe and sales people only seen in the office once in a great while. There are phone systems available that are flexible enough for these businesses too. These modern business phone systems let you forward calls to any phone – even cell phones. As such, your employees can have their office with them while they’re traveling or working from home. This lets your customers can get in touch with them whenever they need to. By being so flexible, you’ll cultivate loyal customers.
- Showing your interest in your customers and not just their money shows that you really do care about them. You can only do this by having a live person answer their calls. Even the most exciting, colorful, or engaging website or email responses won’t make up for your customers’ ability to have personal conversations with you on the phone. There are some customers who simply need that “real” person interaction where they see you portray real feelings and show them they’re important to you – something that can’t be portrayed in any other way.
It Starts with Improving Your own Company First
That another important part of having the right business phone plan in place is also having the right customer service culture in place. This culture must:
- Prioritize customers’ happiness above anything else
- Support and empower your employees so they can always deliver this type of service
- Offer everyday examples of how great internal service works
Taking the time to improve your company’s culture is worth the effort. By creating a company-wide customer service culture, every employee becomes more engaged. When this happens, you’ll benefit in several ways, including:
- Higher productivity: Studies show that happy employees are 12% more productive.
- Lower turnover rates: Replacing employees is costly. It costs 30% – 50% of an entry-level employees’ annual salary to replace them; about 150% of a mid-level employees’ annual salary; and about 400% of a high-level or highly specialized employees’ annual salary.
- Increased customer loyalty: Higher employee engagement doubles your customer loyalty.
- Saves your bottom line: Finding new customers is 5 – 25 times more expensive than the cost of retaining your current customers.
Getting all your employees on board with this type of culture takes some time, but once this concept is well integrated within your company, you’ll improve your customer service and everything else you do – including productivity, employee satisfaction, and your bottom line. This doesn’t mean you should rush into incorporating just any phone system into your office. It’s important to take the time to find the right one. This is the same truth that lies behind finding the right computers, tablets, and Smartphones to use. You want to make sure that the phone system you choose has the right features you need to make all these things happen.