DETROIT – The quality of the customer service and support you provide has to be solid, regardless of the scale at which your business operates.

If you’re failing to meet expectations, loyalty will take a hit, and growth will be out of reach. When it comes to communicating with customers over the phone, there are thankfully a number of ways to keep them happy and engaged, in spite of having limited resources available.

Speak with enthusiasm and positivity

If you sound despondent or distracted when answering calls, customers will feel like they’re inconveniencing you, and that you don’t value them.

It’s best to tweak your tone towards the positive end of the spectrum, and make sure that you are also speaking clearly and at a pace that is neither too fast nor too slow.

There are several positive speaking habits worth adopting, and these will help you with your in-person communication as well as your phone-based customer interactions.

Get a customer service phone number that can be shared among your team

If you aren’t able to answer customer calls, you’ll be falling at the first hurdle in terms of service quality. The solution to avoid missing out is having a team phone number that doesn’t terminate at a single handset, but can function for every member of your team.

You should also consider getting a geographic phone number which is linked to the area where your customers are based. This will lower calling costs, and improve the trustworthiness of your company as well.

Take a personal approach

Customers want to feel like they’re special to you, and the easiest way to do this is to address them by their name.

For first-time callers, ask politely for their name and jot this down so you can refer to it throughout the conversation at suitable moments.

For repeat callers, if you’ve got a CRM system in place you could link this with your phone service and have the name of the customer appear automatically.

Dig deeper into issues

Don’t just consider a customer service call as a way of fixing the problem that’s initially posed. Instead, remember that this could be an opportunity to address other conundrums a customer may be facing, but which they haven’t raised.

Before wrapping up a call, ask if you can assist the customer in any other way. They might well say no, but if they do mention something else, then you’ll be saving yourself another call in the future by solving snafus immediately.

Check audio quality and ambient noise levels

It doesn’t matter how courteous and professional you are on the phone if customers aren’t able to hear you clearly.

Problems with audio could be down to a number of factors, including the hardware you’re using and of course the volume of extraneous sounds bleeding in from elsewhere in the office.

Using the right equipment and keeping calling areas quiet and acoustically well designed will make a big difference.

Be specific

One of the worst things you can do on a customer service call is tell a customer that you’re putting them on hold for ‘a second’ or ‘a moment’, then leave them hanging for minutes on end while you see to whatever task they’ve set you.

If you know that what you’ve got to do to resolve their issue will take longer than half a minute, make sure to say so, and perhaps offer to call them back once you’ve completed it, rather than making them wait on the line.

All this should significantly improve the quality of your customer service by phone, and applies to microbusinesses as well as corporations.

This article was provided by José Luis Martín Cara