Excellent customer service in today’s competitive environment is characterized in many ways. After interviewing, visiting, and reading with some of my favorite customer service gurus I came up with “Mary’s Top 10 Customer Service Tips.”
Some of the all-time great customer service retailers are not so great anymore. We don’t want that to happen to us. It’s important to stick with the basics and be consistent. Here’s 10 tips for excellent customer service.
- Be Responsive: Give your employees the power to be efficient to customer inquiries, whether on the phone, an email, social media, or certainly in person. Timely resolution of an issue is a true cornerstone of great customer service.
- Empathy: Understanding and acknowledging customer emotions and concerns is fundamental. Training your team to be empathetic can help to build strong relationships and trust with your customers.
- Personalization: Tailoring interactions and recommendations based on individual customer preferences and history enhances the customer experience and makes them happy.
- Consistency: Delivering a uniform level of service across all touchpoints in your business. Customers should have the same great quality of service and interaction with every visit to your store
- Proactive Service: A fun little tidbit is to have a customer’s regular purchase on the counter and ready to go when you see them enter your store. This makes them feel very special. We all love to be known and feel like our business is valued.
- Problem Solving: The ability to resolve issues quickly and effectively is crucial. Companies need to empower employees to make decisions that lead to satisfactory resolutions when a customer problem arises.
- Clear Communication: Providing clear, concise, and transparent information to both your team and ultimately to your customers helps to manage expectations and minimizes misunderstandings.
- Mechanisms for Feedback: Encouraging and acting on customer feedback demonstrates that your company values its customers’ opinions and is committed to improvement.
- Building Relationships: Fostering long-term relationships rather than just transactions definitely leads to customer loyalty. Engaging customers through regular communication, loyalty programs, or personalized offers contributes to this.
- Knowledge and Expertise: Well-trained staff that have in-depth knowledge about products, specials, and services can provide accurate information, solve problems, and engage customers daily. Remember: knowledge is power!
In summary, we have all experienced excellent customer service and not so excellent customer service. Keep in mind that a smile, a friendly hello, and a heartfelt “thank you” for your business can go along way with customer experience in your stores! Happy selling!
– This article first appeared in the 2025 edition of the PCA Almanac. Article contributed by Mary Szarmach, VP of Trade Marketing & Government Relations at Smoker Friendly International. Learn more about her stores at https://smokerfriendly.com.