FACTORS TO IMPROVE CUSTOMER SERVICE IN BUSINESS

FACTORS TO IMPROVE CUSTOMER SERVICE IN BUSINESS

Masitah Binti Md Ali (masitahbtmdali@gmail.com)

Faculty of Information Management

University Technology MARA, Campus Puncak Perdana

Abstract

Nowadays, customer is the most important aspect for business continuity; there are several factors that should be considered to improve customer expectation. Customer satisfaction is important in all organization because it is a term that measures how product or services supplied by a company meet or surpass a customer expectation. The main focus of this article is about factor that could lead to improve customer service in business. The factors that been discussed in this article is feedback, customer satisfaction and training. This study is review from the other articles and websites related to the topic. The information used in this research relied on publicly available sources, such as articles and websites.

Keywords: Customer service, Factor leads to customer service, Business.

Introduction

Customer is the person who used or buys our product or service. Customer service is defined as an organization’s ability to meet the needs and desires of its customers (John’s, 2017).  Customer service is important in every business field because it can increase customer loyalty, it is because customers are vital to an organization, and some customers spend hundreds and even thousands of dollars per year with a company (Suttle.R).  In the other hand, customer service refers to the processes and actions that make it easier for customers to do business with a company (Kotler, 2000).Excellent customer service is a vital part of marketing for organization. It is the ability of an organization to consistently exceed the expectations of its customers. Customer service begins before a customer arrives and ends long after the customer leaves your organization (Bruch, 2014) .In order to build their trust we should to take an action by providing the best in customer service.

The satisfaction of customer will depend on how good customer service being delivers by the organization. Companies with high levels of customer satisfaction generate greater returns than companies with lower levels of customer satisfaction (Thalbäck, T). The good customer service can be improve by several factor such as feedback, customer statisfaction, training and

Factors to Improve Customer Service in Business

Feedback

Feedbacks works best when it relates to a specific goals (Libeng). Feedback that been given in an appropriate manner help improve customer service.  Organization who soliciting customer feedback through customer survey, customer visits, a complaint system, customer focus group and other measurement usually improve their service and action (Halvorsrud, R., Kvale, K., & Følstad, A.).

Feedback can be extremely useful to supervisors and manager when addressing customer services goal. Most often the front-line employees who have direct contact with customers can offer valid and helpful feedback on group team or individual performance (Libeng,).  

Fast feedback improves customer service it is because problems are always going to arise for any business no matter how hard you try to avoid them. If customers know that they can voice complaints and those issues will be handled properly, they will feel more comfortable doing business with you (John’s, 2017). Furthermore, customer feedback is so important because it provides marketers and business owners with insight that they can use to improve their business, products and or overall customer experience (Beard, 2014).

Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfactions is an emotional response to the experience provided by, (or associated with) particular products or services purchased, retail outlets, or even molar patterns of behavior, as well as the overall market place (Beard, 2014). In other hand, companies who offer amazing customer experiences create environments where satisfaction is high and customer advocates are plenty.

An Accenture global customer satisfaction report (2008) found that price is not the main reason for customer churn; it is actually due to the overall poor quality of customer service. Customer satisfaction is the metric you can use to reduce customer churn. By measuring and tracking customer satisfaction you can put new processes in place to increase the overall quality of your customer service.

The other customer satisfaction factor that improves customer service is the organizations offering warranties and guarantees. Warranties serve as an agreement that the product will perform as promised or some form of restitution will be made to the customer. Customers who are risk-averse find warranties reassuring (Principles of Marketing, 2015).

Training

The other factor that leads to improve customer service is sending their employee to training. Your employee should be trained well enough to handle customer queries in an effective and efficient manner (Adams, 2016). This situation can make our employee solving customer problem in appropriate way. When your employees’ knowledge and customer service is up-to-the-mark, it helps ensure that your customers have a good experience every time they come in contact with your company (Spears, 2014).

Usually the organization will identify customer need. Then they will implement effective customer service training with employee (Richason, O. E). The factor lead to improve customer service because in the training employee will implement the standards performance to satisfy the customer (Kokemuller, N).

Companies also pay for workers to utilize an automated training program available through an online provider. This approach gives employees a broader perspective on service than what they might get from a proprietary program (Kokemuller, N). Several training program that has be done to improve customer service is Face-to-Face Coaching, Role Playing and Scenarios, Role Modeling and others (McKay,M). With a good training program, employee can build self-motivation and can handle any problem regarding their business field with customer efficiency.

Employee Motivation

Most employees who know their customers understand their needs and are able to meet these needs. Satisfaction in the workplace enables employees to be motivated to meet their customer’s needs. When employees feel satisfied in the organization, they are able to perform their duties better (Zerbe.D.2008). Simon and DeVaro (2006) points out those organizations should view development of the employee’s motivational levels as a worthy investment as it is bound to pay out in the long run by observed improvement in the quality of service given and in improved employee’s efficiency. Gittell, J. H (2004) also advise against minimizing the employee cost as this can result in lower levels of the service offered and lower productivity of employees.

According to Bill Hog (2015), he stated that if the employee knowledgeable and know about company product or service tend to be more proactive and high motivation while dealing with customer. He also said that, the employee also will take the responsibility to handle the situation. Sometime through employee with having empathy to the customer situation will usually calm down the most irate customer. When customer is treated with respect, courtesy and professionalism they are most receptive to having a satisfactory outcome. These situations lead to improve customer service.

Innovation

A new improvement to the self-service industry is the use of the Internet to promote the personalized experience, which makes the visitor to the site feel like he is special and individual business is appreciated. One area that should never receive cutbacks, even in times of economic hardship, is quality assurance, as product quality is the backbone of any business (Brown, J). Many people nowadays use social media a platform to communicate with customer. Social media will easily access to your customers when making changes in our organization we can make use of the social media to achieve more benefit and profit (Clark. A, 2015).

Innovation has become important aspect to improve customer service; it is because customer expectations have increased dramatically in the modern digital era with the widespread adoption of innovative technologies (Gautam.N, 2017). If we don't adapt our business to the changing needs of our customer, we could be losing out on a really great opportunity to make our customers even happier. According to Owens (2017), she stated that any innovation we adopt should improve upon the success or fulfill an important business objective, such as operating more efficiently, reducing escalations, decreasing call volume or responding to changing consumer behavior.

Factors to Improve Customer Service: A Comparison

There are several authors’ views or opinions were then analyzed and it can be seen that most of them had similar points of view though some of it are strictly different from others. This shows that good customer service would take places only when the customers are satisfied with the given services or products that will lead to their statisfaction.

Factor	Author	Opinion
Customer satisfaction	Kimando , L. N., & Njogu, G. W. (2012).	Customer satisfaction is important to enhance service customer.
	Muniu, G. E. (2015)	Customer satisfaction involves activities that are task oriented and is more than proactive selling of products and services through use of face-to face interactions or by use of other communications means such as telephone or mail.
Training	Kimando , L. N., & Njogu, G. W. (2012).	Training is the process of increasing knowledge and skills of an employee for doing particular jobs. Effective training enhances knowledge, skill and behaviors of the people their performance in customer service.
	Muniu, G. E. (2015)	Training is gaining of skill, competencies and knowledge as a result of the instruction of occupational or applied skills and knowledge that relate to specific useful competencies.
Employee Motivation	Kimando , L. N., & Njogu, G. W. (2012).	Employee’s motivation to work consists of all drivers, forces and influences, conscious or unconscious that causes the employee want to achieve certain aims in providing customer services.
	Muniu, G. E. (2015)	Motivation is an employee’s intrinsic enthusiasm about and drives to accomplish activities at work
Innovation	Muniu, G. E. (2015)	Using innovation to create strategies that develop and sustain desirable long-term customer relationships

Conclusion

As a conclusion, a strong company will already have great customer relationships. But a smart company will always be asking “What is good customer service?” Good customer service will carefully listening and attending to our customers’ needs and desires (Morgan,B. 2016). If we are not constantly on the lookout for opportunities to improve our customer service, then our relationships will stagnate. To improve customer service the organization usually the organization does a research to improve their performance.

Furthermore, it’s important to make sure that our customer service team has the right skills for our managing customers’ needs. A bad customer experience at any point in the customer lifecycle can ruin our relationship with them. In addition to making sure the right skills are demonstrated, we need to be sure they’re being demonstrated consistently. Several factors that have been discussed in this article prove the lead of customer service in business.

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