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- Attracting and Retaining Customers: How Customer Service and Customer Support Can Affect Your Business's Growth
Attracting and Retaining Customers: How Customer Service and Customer Support Can Affect Your Business's Growth
The Impact of Exceptional Customer Service and Support on Business Success
Hi Wash Weekly Family.
Today, we’re diving into customer support.
“But Waleed, I already provide great customer service at my store. Why are we discussing customer support?”
I hear you, but customer service and customer support aren’t the same thing.
Customer service is focused on ensuring that customers have a positive experience with a company.
In our world of laundry, this might look like:
Someone calls the store and asks what time you close.
Someone asks the attendant if you sell Tide and rings up the sale.
Customer support, on the other hand, is typically focused on helping customers solve problems or issues they are experiencing.
In our world of laundry, this might look like:
A client calls and states they are having issues placing an order for pickup and delivery. The attendant identifies the issue, corrects it for them, and provides them with the information to avoid this issue in the future. The attendant makes note of the interaction in your store’s support software (more on that in later issues) and sets a reminder to follow up with them in the future.
As you can see, customer support is more involved and develops a deeper connection with our clients.
Here are two great examples from The Laundry Station, focusing on customer service and support and it leading to 5 star reviews on Google:
A great example of customer service
A great example of customer support
I really want you to understand the difference between customer support and customer service because they both play important roles in the success of our businesses.
Good customer support can:
influence how consumers talk about your brand
help you retain clients
build customer loyalty
cause clients to recommend our businesses to others
Don’t take my word for it. Here are some convincing stats:
Repeat customers have a 67% higher chance of purchasing your products than new customers. (Source)
Repeat customers are likely to spend 300% more on your products than new customers. (Source)
Around 61% of customers will switch to your competitors even if they go through only one bad customer support experience. (Source)
Based on those stats alone, you can see how beneficial it is to invest resources to build out our customer support system. Doing so will keep your customers coming back again and again!
So where should you start?
Try these 5 steps:
Define your support goals: Figure out what you want to achieve. Do you want to resolve customer issues quickly? Do you want to improve customer satisfaction?
Choose the right channels: Clients have a number of ways to get in touch with your business — phone, email, chat, and social media. Choose the channels that fit your clients and your business.
Train your team: Train them on the products or services you will be using to assist clients and on best practices.
Set up a system for tracking and managing customer support requests. If you don’t have a system, requests will get lost.
Once you launch your customer support system, keep measuring and improving it.
I hope today’s discussion about customer support vs customer service pushes you to look at how you support your clients.
Remember the difference:
Customer Support: solving customers problems.
Customer Service: improving/enhancing customer experience.
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TL;DR:
Customer service and support are not the same thing.
Customer service is about improving and enhancing the customer experience.
Customer support is about solving customer’s problems.
5 steps to get started with customer support.
Til the next time, I’ll be here airing out some not-so-dirty laundry every Sunday!
– Waleed 🏴☠️
I would love to hear your thoughts on this week’s topic– let me know in this issue’s survey below. And for more on the garment care business, connect with me on Youtube and Linkedin!
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