Improve Your Customer Service With These Tips From Top Leaders

Now that we have the ability to create online communities with the simple click of a button, brand leaders need to take advantage of the countless amount of available data. Particularly, other leaders throughout different industries have insights that could have a tremendous effect on your brand’s daily activity, but it is up to individuals to seek out this information. To make this task a little bit easier, Drew Hendricks of Inc.com has collected 9 customer service tips from business leaders across different industries. You can access the post by clicking here, or by reading below:

This piece was originally published by the Inc.com on August 16, 2017.

“It’s easy for leaders to become so bogged down with day-to-day details that they overlook the importance of providing a solid customer service experience. This is a mistake that you never want to make.

Leaders have the ability to inspire exceptional customer service, such as by empowering employees to take charge.

If you’re struggling with customer service and need a push in the right direction, you can learn a lot from today’s top leaders. Here are eight customer service tips from successful leaders who have faced some of the same challenges as you:

1. Rachel Hogue – Azazie: Every Customer Is Different

Rachel Hogue, Azazie’s Head of Customer Service, knows that just as no two customers are the same, no two employees are the same, either. Rather than trying to mold employees into specific molds, the company embraces the team’s varied interests and backgrounds and strives to find ways to apply employee passions to the greater company picture.

2. Dan Simons – Founding Farmers: Know Your Customers

Dan Simons, co-owner of Founding Farmers, the most booked restaurant in the nation on OpenTable, and a growing collection of farmer-owned restaurants based in Washington, DC, knows that great customer service is about learning to read guests and giving them what they really need on their terms.

Especially in the restaurant business, it’s the job of the staff to create an overall experience for guests, which includes being tuned into their emotional needs. The Founding Farmers team is trained to, not only do what people ask, but also read their non-verbal signals and be empathic. The team is hyper-focused on going above and beyond to create a ‘WOW’ experience for guests.

3. Paul Burke – Guru: Provide Fast Service

Founder of the Guru, an app that brings museum experiences to life through smartphone technology, Paul Burke believes that too often the value of customer service is diminished. Despite all the technology available in today’s world, many companies slack off when it comes to providing timely customer service.

Burke makes it a point to ensure that his team is always providing fast service, as to keep partners happy at all times. Furthermore, the Guru management team emphasizes the importance of being proactive rather than just reactive. They work hard to find the solution before their partners realize there is even a problem.

4. Ryan Stobie – Adventure Bucket List: Listen to Suggestions

As an entrepreneur revolutionizing travel booking for local hospitality providers, Ryan Stobie and his team believe that their customers are their best innovators. Customer feedback is the most valuable information when it comes to planning U/I improvements and feature releases. This approach allows Adventure Bucket List to implement new features in a timely manner, thus keeping up with customer demands.

5. Richard Werbe – Studypool: Make Yourself Available

Co-founder of micro-tutoring platform, Studypool, Richard Werbe understands that accessibility and transparency are the keys to success. Entirely too many companies say they offer a high-quality customer service experience, just to fall short time and time again. This often results from a lack of availability.

Studypool makes it a point to let customers know that they can contact them in a variety of ways, such as via email and social media (among others).

6. Brendan Candon – SidelineSwap: Be Proactive

For equipment-swapping platform SidelineSwap, strong customer service is the result of proactivity. Founder Brendon Candon encourages his team to actively seek feedback from your customers, and take the initiative to solve problems before the customer has a chance to become more frustrated.

We reach out to every buyer and seller to ask about their experience, and our team discusses recurring themes in the feedback when deciding which features to build next.

We also set alerts for our customer support team where issues most often occur during a transaction. We believe we can turn a potentially negative experience into a loyal customer by showing that we care.

7. Olin Hyde – LeadCrunch: Measure Success By Measuring Your Customer’s Success

View customer satisfaction as a measure of a more holistic approach to customer success. LeadCrunch’s technology provides visibility into how well customer’s demand generation campaigns perform so can continually improve the value of LeadCrunch’s leads.

As LeadCrunch’s Customer Service team works to resolve problems, it is the responsibility of the Customer Success team to proactively ensure customers will get the most benefit. Both teams are necessary — just like an offensive and defensive team in football.

8. Jeff Bezos – Amazon: Focus on What Works

Bezos believes that companies should be relentless when it comes to providing a high-quality customer service experience.

In the early days of Amazon, Bezos was leading a company that is nowhere near as big and powerful as it is today. But guess what? He still had the same dedication to customer service – and this has never changed.

9. Charles Anderson – Currency: Listen to your customer

Charles Anderson, CEO of Currency, is a firm believer in listening to customers. Whether it’s taking calls, reading complaints or sitting amongst staff, Charles makes sure that he understands customer needs and the impediments to meeting them. Charles added, “As CEO, it is so easy to become disassociated from your customer and rely on reports and feedback to ‘stay connected.’ Inevitably this is a recipe for disaster. When I’m speaking to the customer, I gain context and can add value to the business, it’s that simple.”

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