Brian Colpak Explains 9 Tips Any Entrepreneur Can Use to Improve Their Customer Service

Many entrepreneurs focus a lot of their time and effort on the products or services they provide.

They focus on seeing those ideas materialize into actual offerings. They focus on building teams of people who can help them get the business off the ground. They focus on marketing the offerings so they can gain customers.

But many forget to initially focus on customer service. Today, a customer experience is essential for any successful startup.

Customers who feel they are treated well will come back for more and even refer you to new customers. Those who don’t have a great experience will do just the opposite — draining your limited resources and forcing you to acquire new customers.

In this article, tech entrepreneur Brian Colpak gives nine tips that any entrepreneur can use to improve their customer service.

1. Invest in Training

Every employee you hire is a representative of your company. Some of these employees will be interacting directly with customers, so it’s essential that they are knowledgeable, friendly, and helpful.

It’s your job as the business owner to find people who inherently have some of these skills and then train them on the specifics of how your company does things.

2. Set High Standards

There is no job that should be viewed as lower on the totem pole than others at your company. Even entry-level customer service reps should be treated as if their job is as essential as the CEO’s. And in many ways, that’s actually true.

Setting high standards for your company as a whole will trickle down from the executive team to management to employees. Your customers will notice this and get a better experience because of it.

3. Establish a Good Culture

Employees want to work at a company where they feel respected, valued, and included. When you create this kind of work culture, your employees will perform better. They’ll be happy to come to work and enthusiastic to share their excitement with customers. Customers will take notice of this, and come back to you over your competitors.

4. Set Clear Paths

There are those inevitable times when a customer service employee will not have the knowledge or power to solve a customer’s problem. If you have clear paths for how these problems should be escalated, your customers’ problems will be solved more efficiently.

When employees know their roles inside and out, it ultimately results in the customer being served better.

5. Automate in Smart Ways

Automation can sometimes get a bad rap, but it’s something customers desire more and more every day. Tech companies are using automation and self-serve functions to allow customers to solve problems on their own without the need to reach out to the companies.

Others are using online chatbots in similar ways that can significantly speed up solutions to common problems. In the busy world around us, customers appreciate saving time.

6. Integrate Tools

Technology can be great, but it can also be very frustrating if it doesn’t work properly. We live in an “I want it now” world, and the only way to get that in customer service is with solid tools.

Brian Colpak suggests every company should invest in the proper technology to make sure their employees can help customers quickly and efficiently. There’s nothing more embarrassing than asking customers to hold because computers are crashing or taking forever to load.

7. Understand Touchpoints

It’s key to understand that customers can interact with your company in different ways. It’s not just when they come to your store or call you on the phone, for example.

They’re interacting with you when they’re using your products/services or seeing advertising about your company. In other words, customer service is something you always need to be thinking about.

8. Get Feedback

Do you know how your customers feel about you? You should, and if you don’t, you certainly should ask them.

Conduct surveys on the phone and online. Ask for feedback whenever you can. Incentivize customers to tell you how they feel. This is invaluable information.

9. Respond to the Feedback

Getting feedback is worthless if you’re not going to do anything about it. Not all customer suggestions will be good ones, of course. But it’s likely there will be some common themes to the feedback you receive.

Make necessary changes to how you do things based on the best feedback you get. Then, communicate to your customers that you made these changes based on the feedback they gave you. Customers will appreciate knowing that you listened to them.

About Brian Colpak

Brian Colpak is a tech entrepreneur and the founder of Continental Global. After spending most of his career in managerial positions, he founded and led a company that was recognized as one of the top 100 fastest growing companies in Massachusetts before starting his current company. These days his main focus is on an upcoming project in Dubai.