Unless you're Santa Claus, you can't be everywhere at once (and even he can only do that once a year). So when deciding where and how to support your small business customers, you have some tough choices to make. Which customer service channels should be your primary focus and which can you leave as a future option? This decision is ultimately based on three factors: Your team (their capacity, skills and interests).Your customers (their expectations, their needs, their context and their capacities).Your industry (the trends and standards you need to be aware of).In this article, we'll look at the variety of support channels available.
To your business before diving into each of these three factors so you can make an informed decision on where and how to spend your limited customer service resources. Choose the right support channels for your business Don't try to be good at every channel; be good to a few In their book “Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business”, Frances Frei and Anne Morris write: “To employee data achieve service excellence, you need to strategically underperform. It means providing the dimensions of service that your customers value the most, and then making it possible - profitable and sustainable - by performing poorly on the dimensions that they value the least.
In other words, you must be evil in the service of good. Frei and Morris argue forcefully that companies can't be exceptional in every way, and that great service forces you to make the hard choice to be mediocre in ways your customers don't care. Keep that in mind as a bulwark against the temptation to say, "We'll be great on every possible channel!" For most of us, time and money limitations make this an impossible dream. KEY TAKEAWAY: It's better for your customers, your team, and your business to focus and excel in a few support channels than to be scattered and provide inconsistent service across all of them.