Customer Service is Not Dead!

Great customer service is often the key to making or breaking a business. While failure to provide a high standard of service will sometimes result in a business failing. providing a high standard of service can often propel a business to a high market dominance among its competitors. Recognizing this, we at VerifyInvestor.com pride ourselves on our great customer service and want to share with you three keys to focus on for success, and three things to avoid when it comes to how you treat each and every one of your clients.

Three keys to success:

1. Knowledge - Obviously when you are selling a product or service your customer service representatives should be product experts. Nothing turns away customers more than salespeople not being able to answer their questions. This delegitimizes the business and reflects poorly on the entire structure of the company including management as it is the management’s responsibility to train and educate their staff.

2. Professionalism and Responsiveness - Both of these concepts go hand in hand, hence why we grouped them together. No matter how informal someone is in their private life while conducting business one must always act professionally in most settings. This includes good manners, avoiding controversial subjects, and similarly being responsive within a reasonable window of time. If you are rude or take too long to respond to a customer’s inquiries they will quickly move on to your competitors.

3. Active Listening - This may be one of the most important aspects of customer service, as a customer always wants to be heard. Even if you cannot compromise or fulfill a certain request, the customer must at least always feel like a business is listening to their feedback or concerns. We all have two ears and one mouth, so it is prudent to always listen twice as much as you speak. 

Three things to avoid:

1. Cover-ups - Trying to cover up mistakes can be both rude or outright unethical. Taking responsibility is a great way of establishing trust with customers. Everyone makes mistakes and at the end of the day, customer loyalty may depend on how honest your company is in certain situations.

2. Ignore feedback - Getting tips about your product or service directly from your customer base is free research and development. This goes along with the importance of active listening, in that failure to do so could result in lost customers, especially if their feedback goes unanswered. Consider everything your customers tell you because their advice could lead to a breakthrough new product or introduce your firm to a new market niche.

3. Broken promises - Honesty and openness to meet every customer’s needs is a fine balance. As much as we would like to be everything for all our clients, all the time, being honest about a projection or timeframe is very important as making promises you can not keep will come back to haunt your company. Giving clear and concise predictions and boundaries may cause temporary friction, but outright lying to your customers to serve temporary satisfaction is not an effective way to do business.

While providing accredited investor verification services to our accredited investor clients, we understand that legal processes can be confusing and frustrating, therefore we do everything in our power to make the process as frictionless as possible. When we verify accredited investors we always help along the way, when necessary, no matter what the inquiry or request for assistance might involve. At the same time, we are continuously striving to improve the accredited investor verification form, to make it as efficient and user-friendly as possible. To learn more about business finance, from customer service tips to the difference between Rule 506(b) vs Rule 506(c),  keep up to date by using the VerifyInvestor.com blog.