The best customer service software makes getting and managing customer feedback easy. It also makes it easy to use that feedback to improve and grow your business. We highlight what you should be looking for in your customer service software here.
What's your business worth? Maybe, after a long talk with your bank, an analysis of your assets and some deeply boring research into valuation approaches, you could come up with a number. But that wouldn't tell the whole story.
Your business represents countless hours that you've spent away from your family, worries that keep you up at night and the hassles that come with managing employees. Hopefully, your business also gives you tremendous satisfaction, to say nothing of the value that it brings your customers.
Or maybe you're more interested in the dollar amount. Either way, your business is worth... well, a lot.
So what wouldn't you do to improve it? And what would you pay for the tools that could bring about that improvement?
Customer service software makes it easy to take the steps necessary to grow your business, for dollars a day.
"Customer Service Software"? What the Heck Is That?
If your brick-and-mortar business doesn't rely much on tech, customer service software might sound like some confusing complication that will only add stress to your life. (And frankly, some versions might, which is why it's important to choose the right one for your needs.)
This software should actually simplify your life by doing some of the customer service work that you're currently doing manually or maybe not doing at all.
Different versions do different things, including:
- Contacting your customers via text message or email and tracking who you've already contacted and how they've responded.
- Sending customized messages that direct customers to the review site of your choice (Yelp, Facebook, TripAdvisor, etc.).
- Notifying you when customers post new reviews on any of your chosen review sites.
- Creating comprehensive reports that allow you to see how your customer experience is changing over time.
And some types of customer service software, like ReputationStacker, offer all those services and more.
Okay. But Why Do I Need That?
Think about how you currently get customer feedback. Maybe you get a mix of emails, phone calls and in-person feedback - likely from customers who are unhappy about something. Do customers often reach out to tell you what you're doing well? If so, count yourself as one of the lucky few.
Using the feedback you do get, you might make some adjustments. Maybe a customer last week mentioned that the door was sticking, so you greased it. Or someone complains about the potholes in the parking lot, so you made a mental note to research paving companies.
With these individual morsels of feedback, you can make small changes, one at a time. It's an inefficient way to improve your business. Each time one of those phone calls or emails comes in you have to stop what you're doing, turn your attention to the feedback, maybe make some notes and then try to remember what you were working on.
Meanwhile, you have no idea what you're doing really well. What your happy customers want you to do more of. What you could do to bring them in even more often or get them to spend more money.
And because satisfied customers don't tend to be as motivated to write online reviews as the dissatisfied ones, your ratings on sites like Yelp are probably lower than they could be. Maybe you so rarely get reviews on those sites that potential customers are wary of giving you their business, instead choosing to work with your competitor because it has lots of reviews.
So What's It Worth?
It's impossible to predict the value of customer service software because it can have a domino effect. But the only direction you can go is up.
Say you start using it and double the number of positive online reviews you get each week. That increased activity raises your profile to search engines, so your site appears near the top of the results page when people search for businesses like yours. More people learn about you, and business increases that week. That, in turn, leads to even more reviews, which raises your profile again. Now some of those people who wrote reviews share them with their Facebook friends, and some of those friends decide to check you out. Meanwhile, it takes you just minutes each day to read all the feedback you receive, giving you plenty of time to make improvements based on what you've read.
That's the value of a system like ReputationStacker. It leverages customer feedback in a way that greatly helps grow your business by attracting new customers. Plans range from just $69 to $99 per business location per month.
Once More for the Businesses in the Back
No matter how well your business is doing, it can always be better. You're not necessarily the expert on how to improve it, though - your customers have valuable insights into what you're doing well and what you could do better.
Get their honest feedback, both positive and negative, using customer service software. Systemize the way you get that feedback with ReputationStacker.
