Small Business Customer Service: 7 Tips to Capture Leads

For a small business, every customer counts. A single bad review or lost client can hurt you. 

So, you’re looking for ways to keep customers happy, retain them for the long haul, and boost your bottom line. Here’s the good news: You can hit all of these goals and more with a good customer service (CS) program. 

We’ve created this guide with seven customer service tips for small businesses to keep customers happy and achieve sustainable growth. We’ll also cover the key factors to consider when looking for a customer support platform for your business. 

Let’s break down our top tips. 

7 Customer Service Tips for Small Businesses 

70% of consumers spend more with companies that offer fluid and seamless customer experiences. Exceptional customer service lies at the core of your customer experience (CX) setup. It can build a stronger brand reputation and win customer loyalty. Or, it can damage your image and shrink your bottom line. 

We’ve curated these seven small business customer service tips to help you turn CS into a growth lever for your company.

1. Invest in Customer Service Early

Small businesses often prioritize client acquisition over retention to build the groundwork for success. Customer service naturally takes a backseat. But while getting new clients might seem important initially, overlooking your existing clients can hurt your business in the long run. 

So, focus on delivering a meaningful post-sales experience by building your customer service workflows early on. Here’s how:

• Build a team and create automated workflows to handle customer queries.
• Produce self-service resources, like a knowledge base or in-app documentation.
• Pick the most feasible delivery channels, like chat, support tickets, phone, and similar.

Even if you start with a small team, remember to invest more resources into scaling your customer service teams to maximize delight and retention.

2. Decide Which Channels You’re Going to Cover

Customers have multiple options to connect with your business—chatbots, social media platforms, emails, ticketing systems, calls, and more. For a small business like yours, this can complicate the ability to deliver a seamless customer experience, especially if you can’t create an omnichannel customer service setup. 

That’s why placing your bets on core communication channels that your customers use most often is important. Survey your target buyers to identify their preferred format or channel for accessing support. 

Deciding on these channels will also allow you to focus on achieving higher customer satisfaction. 

Pro tip: 70% of customers use self-serve resources at some point in their journey to resolving a query. So, double down on self-service channels like a knowledge base and website chat to offer your clients round-the-clock support. 

3. Personalize Your Customer Experience

Consider customer service as an opportunity to turn new customers into brand advocates. An effective way to accomplish this is by offering tailor-made experiences to customers before and after their purchase, especially when offering support. 

Analyze customer data to personalize their experience by:

• Adding their first name in all communication.
• Creating a unified customer journey map for all channels on your CRM.
• Using their insights to offer personalized recommendations on self-serve channels.
• Giving your customer service representatives a detailed look into their relationship with your business.

Make your clients feel seen and heard with a high degree of personalization in your customer service. More importantly, diversify your data sources to deliver deeper personalization. The more nuanced data you have about your customers, the more immersive experiences you can create. 

Image source: Zendesk

4. Consider Customer Feedback 

Collecting feedback is the easiest way to understand customer expectations and identify the gaps and opportunities in your customer service strategy. 

This will help you determine the right direction and best steps to improve your customer service experience. Not just that, but it also positions you as a caring and customer-centric business. 

Use any of these methods to collect customer feedback and stay on top of their needs:

• Interviews 
• Email forms
• Social listening
• Feature requests
• Customer surveys

Before you set out to collect customer feedback, decide why you want to hear from your customers and the outcomes you wish to achieve. Establish and communicate your goals to give them a reason to participate in the feedback. 

5. Define the Skills You Want for Your Customer Service Team

It goes without saying that the success of your customer service efforts hinges on the capabilities of your support agents. Your workflows, tools, and other resources can only take you so far. Your support staff is the most critical link in the chain. 

So, invest ample time in finding the right people for your team. Research indicates retaining and developing the best customer support team is one of the top three priorities for businesses. 

Start by defining your ideal candidate and create a skill matrix. Use this ideal candidate profile and matrix as the reference frame for your hiring decisions. 

Here are a few essential skills to look for in a customer service representative:

• Problem-solving
• Resourcefulness 
• Business knowledge 
• Clear communication
• Emotional intelligence 
• Persuasion and empathy
• Patience and perseverance 

6. Build Good Rapport with Customers

One of the biggest goals of your CS team should be to cultivate meaningful and healthy relationships with your customers. The key is establishing a solid rapport with them to earn their trust and ensure long-term loyalty. 

Follow these tried-and-tested practices to build a good rapport with your clients:

• Practice empathy to understand their pain points and provide helpful responses. 
• Actively hear their concerns/challenges to offer the exact solution they need.
• Let them take the lead and talk more by asking open-ended questions.
• Use their words and language when giving resolutions to any query.

Train your CS team to display the core values of empathy and compassion while interacting with customers. Besides communication, focus on eliminating friction from the customer experience to make their lives easier. 

7. Try a Customer Service Software

Choosing the right software is the final and most important point in our list of small business customer service tips. A great customer service tool can empower your CS reps with higher productivity and give your customers a hassle-free support platform to get help quickly.

For a small business, a good tool can also save costs by reducing the number of customer service agents you need on the team. Besides, you can design automated workflows to resolve queries efficiently without breaking a sweat. 

In the rest of our guide, we’ll discuss choosing the right customer service software for small businesses. 

Why Is Customer Service Important for Small Businesses? 

Approximately 20% of small businesses fail within the first year of their launch, and 50% in five years. These numbers make you wonder: What separates successful businesses from failed ones? 

The short answer is exceptional customer service. Here’s how:

• Boosts referrals: Keeping customers happy pays dividends in the form of positive word-of-mouth and referrals. These happy customers actively recommend your brand to others in their network. They become an organic channel of marketing and drive revenue through referrals. 
• Win more loyal customers: A good customer service experience fosters loyalty. Customers who enjoy a quick response time for their queries, meaningful support, and a frictionless experience will stick to your brand for the long haul instead of looking for alternatives. 
• Improves customer retention: 72% of business leaders agree that personalized customer service increases retention. By retaining more clients, you can save the cost of acquiring new business and focus on maximizing the average customer lifetime value. 
• Builds better company branding: Your customer service directly impacts your brand reputation. Satisfied customers will leave positive reviews, which creates a good impression for potential buyers. 

These benefits can accelerate your business growth and become a huge differentiator. But how do you ensure your customer service program ticks all the boxes? With the right CS software. 

Let’s look at the key features to consider when choosing a customer service platform for your small business. 

How to Choose a Customer Service Software: 4 Factors to Consider 

With so many customer service solutions in the market, choosing the best one for your business can be a tough call. We’ll make the decision easier by explaining the four most important factors to make an informed choice:

• Evaluate Usability and Learning Curve

One of the first parameters to evaluate is the platform’s ease of implementation and usability. You want the solution to do the heavy lifting on behalf of your CS team, and a complicated interface would only make this harder to achieve. 

Tools with a longer learning curve will also need more time and resources before you can fully set up and roll out your workflows. You’ll waste more time training new employees to use it. 

So, closely check the tool’s ease of use for your team to design, execute, and iterate workflows. 

• Evaluate Flexibility and Scalability

The trickiest part of choosing a customer service solution for a small business owner is the ability to expand its functionality as your business grows. The ideal software should easily align with your needs and scale seamlessly as the volume of customer queries increases. 

Besides, you should also have the flexibility to implement cross-functional processes and build solid coordination between CS, sales, marketing, and other teams.  

• Ensure it Aligns with Your Business Goals and Needs

Another decisive factor is how well a tool matches your business needs and goals. While every software caters to a broad set of users, a great customer service solution is easily configurable to align its functions to your exact requirements. 

For example, if you want to create a help desk and let customers access it via chat, your ideal software should be able to deliver this specific requirement. 

• Take Reviews into Account

Your search for excellent customer service software is incomplete without customer reviews. Take a closer look at what existing users have to say about the tool and identify any major red flags. Their first-hand reviews can reveal shortcomings that you might not find in the initial tests. 

A Tailored Customer Service Platform for Your Small Business 

Podium is a customer service and communication solution for small businesses. With a suite of tools, Podium equips your support team to effortlessly interact with customers through multiple communication channels and bring their A-game. 

Podium Inbox centralizes communication from all channels to make your team more efficient in responding to inbound leads and servicing existing clients. In the same way, you can store all client information in a single, systematic CRM designed for small businesses. Not just that, Phones offer a modern, convenient way to connect your CS agents to customers for real-time conversations. 

Besides empowering your team with these tools, Podium can make your website more interactive with Webchat. 

FAQs

How can small businesses improve customer service?

Small businesses can improve customer service by following these seven tips:

• Invest in customer service early.
• Decide which channels you’re going to cover.
• Personalize your customer experience.
• Consider customer feedback. 
• Define the skills you want for your customer service team.
• Build good rapport with customers.
• Try a customer service software.

Why is customer service important for small businesses?

Customer service is important for small businesses because it can bring several benefits, such as:

• More revenue through referrals. 
• Higher customer retention rates. 
• Better brand reputation and positioning. 
• Create more loyal customers with brand affinity.

What is business customer service?

Business customer service is the post-purchase support you provide customers when they have a query/concern or face a problem. The goal is to help customers resolve issues quickly by offering an excellent experience.