MBA1442 3 Simple Ideas To Improve Your Customer Service + Free Ride Friday

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Hey, today is Free Ride Friday so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. It retails for $500 over at EasyCourse co. Or you can win it for free. Just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Just listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that simple. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on itunes. All right, let's jump into today's episode. Heyo. Welcome to the $100 MBA show where your business skills get better and better every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode you will learn three simple ideas to improve your customer service. Your customer service is so important when it comes to competing with your competition. It's your major differentiator. I could tell you firsthand that with Webinar Ninja, our webinar software, our customer service really has helped us grow tremendously. When you buy a product it's not just the product you're buy, the experience, it's the support. It's the feeling that, hey, this company has my back and will be there for me whenever I need them. But if you're just getting started, you may not have an army of customer service ninjas. So I want to share with you three simple ideas that will drastically improve your customer service. If you haven't implemented them already, these are three small things you can do to make sure your customers feel valued and they get the service they expect. Can't wait to get into it. So let's get down to business. All right, I want to share with you three quick, simple ideas to really improve your customer service. And the first one is very simple, but very powerful. And it's expectations. You want to set up expectations for your customers when it comes to your customer service. When they should expect a reply, when they should receive some sort of contact, whatever that may be. That could be one hour, that could be five minutes, it could be 24 hours. You need to make sure it's clear to your customer when they should expect a reply. And what you want to do here is you want to extend this a little bit because you want to under promise and over deliver. So if you normally reply within an hour, then say we reply within three hours. So that when you do reply within an hour, it's like, wow, that was quicker than I expected. But it's all about expectations. So wherever you send your customers to get support, whether it's a support page, like a page on your website, or using some sort of support chat messenger like Intercom or Zendesk, you need to put that message of, hey, we typically reply within X amount of time. Now there are tools like Intercom which actually adjust that expectation automatically so it actually averages your average response time and gives it to you. But you also have the option of setting your own response time and just saying, we respond within 24 hours, for example. But the point here is expectations. A lot of people are upset with a product, with a service, with a business because you don't say when you're going to reply. And no matter what you do, unless it's five minutes, right response time or less, it's going to be too long. They're going to be like, wow, they took an hour. When you set up expectations, you avoid disappointment. So make sure you're doing this right now. This is gonna help you, especially at the start, to be able to make sure your customers are coming to you. Happy now one of the ways to also Kind of set expectations and to put them at ease is to have some sort of autoresponder auto reply, whether it's an email or via chat, but just have an automatic email that gets sent to them when they reach out to you or send you an email like to supporthever that says, hey, we got your email, we've received your communication, your ticket, your question and we'll get back to within X amount of time. This gives them a sense of reassurance that hey, the email went through, you got it, you're on top of it. Next, this is a must, the second one, number two and it's self service. And this is in the form of a knowledge base. You can help your customers serve themselves and reduce the number of emails you get or support tickets you get by having a knowledge base. This is simply a place, a repository for all your tutorials to walk them through whatever it is, whether it's login or reset of their password, all the common questions they may have. You want to have a knowledge base and you want to build upon your knowledge base as you build your business because you're going to build new features and you get new questions and you just want to make sure that you're going to be able to help your customers help themselves. And I like to present the knowledge base to them while they're waiting. So if it's chat that says hey, we respond within five minutes. In the meantime, um, here's our knowledge base. You may want to search there to help you out. If you're sending an email responder, hey, email, got your ticket, got your question, we respond within one hour. In the meantime, check out our knowledge base. You might find your answer right there. Speak soon. Very easy, right? And if you're just launching, you should have a general idea of some how to articles that you can write in your knowledge base. The basic functions of your software, your course, your platform, your service, whatever it is, this is going to help your customers feel like they're being served, just like you feel like you're served at the airport with a kiosk to check yourself in. It's convenient, it's easy and you can take care of things yourself. Good. I personally love this kind of service because they're giving me the tools to help myself and I love that. And the third idea that you really need to implement is quality over speed. You want to make sure that you're giving quality support. You want to give the best answers, the most thorough answers, the answers that really solve the problem and get some the Result they want rather than just feeding them articles or feeding them one liner. This is especially important in chat. You're doing chat support now. I know I just mentioned the knowledge base, but this is just saying, hey, we have a knowledge base. Check it out. You may want to search for your answer there. But a lot of people in support or the way they train the support team is like they just feed them an article, they say, hey, you need to reset your password. Here are the steps. Follow this article. That's not really great support. If this is chat, you can really walk them through it. Why don't you walk them through it? And we encourage our support team to do that and say, hey, this is how you reset your password. That's real great support. That's human. That's how you would help a friend. And by walking somebody step by step, you make sure before they get off the chat that they're taken care of, that you got their back. And they're like, wow, thank you so much. You helped me. And that's a better experience than just giving them a support tutorial. And they just, you know, try to scan it and do it. It looks lazy. It looks like you don't care. Walking them step by step really shows you or shows them that, that you really have their best interest in mind. You can also send them the tutorial after you've done it, say, hey, I walked you step by step. Here's a tutorial you can save or bookmark if you ever forget how to do this. Happy to help at any time. Quality over quickness. I know a lot of people think, hey, I want to be answering tickets as fast as possible. Chats or, you know, emails. If you can answer a customer with a reply or two, that's better than sending them a short response and they're like, that's not so great. And they have follow up questions and more follow up questions. So quality over speed. And quality also means asking questions, trying to find out what they're really trying to do, what they're really struggling with so you can actually solve the real problem rather than just again, feeding them a tutorial. All these things cost very little in terms of time and effort. It's just a mindset and some small tweaks you can do in your customer service team. Even if that's just you right now, if you're answering all the tickets, that's totally fine. I answered every single support ticket for years before we hired a team or hired our first agent even. But as you grow, you can implement these things as well. It's not just for beginners. So number one, expectations. Number two, a knowledge base to let them self serve. And number three, quality over speed.

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To wrap up today's lesson, customer service can really make a huge difference in your business. Why? Because you work so hard to acquire your customers. You gotta hold onto them. And customer service is a big part of making sure you hold onto your customers. Your retention, lowering your churn. Every time a customer comes by, they go and they don't continue to pay. You buy new products or worse, cancel and want a refund. You're spending effort and time and money on marketing and it's going down the drain. So customer service is a lifesaver for businesses. Make sure you invest in it. All right, that wraps up today's lesson. But today's episode's not over. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is Mi Lin. Mi Lin says Clear and concise. Five stars. I love the style and format of these podcasts and really appreciate Omar's viewpoints as well as the guest teachers. The advice is realistic and concrete, so I'm motivated to take action immediately instead of feeling like it's theory and maybe someday I'll implement it or it'll be the right time. Thank you so much M3 Lynn, for the amazing review. Your mission is to email me at omar100-mba net so I can hook you up with the free ride to Ezcourse, our $500 course over at EasyCourse Co that teaches you step by step how to build an online course in 30 days. Hey, if you're listening and like hey how can I win a free ride to Ezcourse? Just leave us an iTunes rating and a review and then listen in on Friday to see if you won. That simple. Super, super simple. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Many of us don't want to deal with customer service because they think, hey, customers are going to be emailing, complaining, being angry, and it's just something we want to avoid. Get over that quickly because this is where you learn how to improve. When your customers email and ask questions or even complain, you learn where you can improve, where you can add to your product what they actually want, or where there's confusion. This is where you perfect your business. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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