With the start of another new year, the time for basic customer service housekeeping is now. Over the course of the previous year, various updates and tweaks to our different service avenues may have altered the easy, straight-forward experience we’ve intended and our customers expect to enjoy. Let’s take the time to do a little housekeeping in our quality control.
Get Social
Jump onto all of your social media channels and ensure that their information is not outdated. Is the description still fitting for your current branding and product offerings? Are the featured photos current? Is the website information correct? Are any and all phone numbers provided the proper ones for the purposes stated? Have any of the social channels fallen to the wayside? Update anything necessary and determine if efforts need to be redoubled to maintain or ramp up engagement.
Get Googling
Can your customers find you? Google the company and see if the results properly direct inquiring customers to you. Is your contact information correct in Google results? Do Yelp and any other review sites contain correct hours of operation, phone numbers, and website information? Does your hosted website pop up at the top of results? Ensuring customers can find us is the first step to success.
Get Surfing
Navigate to your website and ensure everything is functioning properly. Is the site displaying correctly? Across various browsers? Is contact information easy to find and current? Are any and all pages with time sensitive information updated (a sale or special offers page shouldn’t be displaying promos from 2014)? Is the site easy to view and navigate from both Android and Apple mobile devices? In an increasingly digitized world, it’s imperative that customers can access our sites from anywhere they are.
Get Calling
Call into your phone system. If there is a welcome message, is it relaying current information? Is it easy to understand? Is it professional and welcoming? If there is a phone menu, does each selection properly transfer the caller to where they intended to go? Is it an intuitive system (does a caller press 0 to speak to someone immediately or do they need to make an arbitrary selection like 4)? Are any of the selections broken links? An otherwise happy customer can quickly become soured by dealing with a poorly designed or poorly maintained phone system.
Investing the time now to ensure all systems are in order will pay dividends down the road when customers can easily find us, buy from us, contact us, and interact with us. Customer service is just as much about preventing foreseeable problems as it is fixing them, and these are simple ways we can, and should, be proactive.