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Why Time Management Is Key To Good Customer Service
Author: Alyice Edrich
Customer complaints are never easy for small businesses. Especially since they are run with a staff of five or less individuals. When a lot of heart, soul, and pure sweat goes into every order, it's hard to hear that you've failed in some way, that your product isn't good enough, that your customer service was poor. It's hard to remain objective.
But that's exactly what you must do!
The first step towards dealing with any customer service issue is to acknowledge how it makes you feel, as an individual. Once those feelings are acknowledged, it will be easier to see things from an objective, and much calmer, standpoint.
And that's where you need to be if you want to turn that bad experience into a positive one.
No matter what type of business you run, customer service is vital to the success of your business.
Positive word-of-mouth sells.
Negative word-of-mouth does not.
One bad experience by the “right” customer could have your company flamed on every message board, chat room, news station, or publication out there; resulting in tons of lost sales. Too many complaints, and too many lost sales, and your business has no choice but to close its doors, forever.
And sadly, that’s exactly what happens to many home-based businesses run by work-at-home mothers eager to have it all.
After sinking their heart, soul, and family’s savings into their businesses, they discover that it is too difficult to juggle a newborn baby, a toddler, a husband, a household, a volunteer position at church, a weekly friend’s night out, and still give everything that's needs to run a growing business.
Something has to give and it’s usually the business that suffers!
When a business isn't given adequate time to grow, it results in poor customer service: unreturned phone calls, unreturned customer emails, improper handling of customer complaints, and non-shipment or delayed shipping of products ordered.
Within a matter of months the business folds and the mom’s convinced herself the problem lies with the product. She tries again—this time with a “better product” and a “better understanding” of how things work but she’s forgotten one key element: time management.
Good time management increases your chances
of providing exceptional customer service.
She’s forgotten to downsize her life to accommodate her new business and once again, customer service issues prevail and orders aren’t fulfilled on time.
Customers don’t care if your baby is sick, if your uncle died, if your washer broke and you have to do all your laundry at the laundry mat, if you receive 100 emails a day, if you only order product once a month and it was backordered by the manufacturer, or the countless other “legitimate” excuses you have for not keeping your business-related promises.
Customers don’t know you on a personal level and they have no personal investment in your life. All they care about is how well you complete the promises you made to provide exceptional customer service and a reliable product.
Customer service is really quite simple…
treat your customers how you'd like to be treated
if you were shopping with your company.
If your product doesn’t live up to what you say it does, if you treat your customers with disrespect, or if you aren’t willing to handle complaints efficiently, your customers will have no problem venting to every person they know—heck, they might even blog about it!
Do you really want to spend your energy combating negative publicity? Or would you rather spend that time working on and growing your business?
When you are pulled in too many directions, customer service suffers.
These time management tips will help you improve customer service, by improving the overall performance of your business:
Break big tasks into smaller ones
If you're constantly stressed out about not completing a big project, you can find yourself putting off the little, everyday tasks, in hopes of completing that bigger task. The problem with this mentality is that it puts you further and further behind on everything you need to accomplish in a single day.
Instead of focusing on the big project, as a whole, break it up into smaller, more manageable projects then give yourself a deadline for completing each of those tasks. This will give you a sense of accomplishment and allow you to move onto the everyday tasks that help keep your business up and running.Learn to delegate
One reason small businesses fail is because the owners try to be everything to everyone. When you're running around trying to do the job of ten people, you cannot efficiently do the job of even one of those people.
By delegating non-important, non-essential tasks, you free up time. Freeing up time prevents you from feeling over-stressed and frazzled and can help increase concentration. It can also free up enough time to allow you to work on the more pressing, more important tasks at hand.Prioritize tasks
Take a look at everything you need to do to make your business work, then create a schedule that allows you to tackle time-sensitive issues first, work on projects that have deadlines near, and then work on the operations that keep the business running on a daily basis.
Once you've prioritized your tasks, set up a routine that will allow you to efficiently tackle those tasks in the order they need to be done.Learn to say no
Whether it's wasting time chatting with friends on instant messenger, or agreeing to babysit a friend's child, you need to know when to say no to friend and family who think running a small business from home means you have a lot of free time on your hands.
It also means knowing when it's okay to leave the house a little messier than usual, to order fast food instead of eating a homecooked meal, and when you just have to say, "Sorry, I cannot commit to that right now."Create a new habit
When you run a small business, your time becomes a precious commodity. You have to work more efficiently, you have to do things you may not enjoying doing, you can't procrastinate, and have to create a plan of attack that offers some sort of balance between family life and business life. And that means creating new habits, and maybe even breaking a few olds one.User a timer
Socializing online, even for business, can waste a lot of valuable time.
When you need to read, reply, and answer emails, set the timer. When the timer dings, you're done for the day. When you visit social networking sites and forums in hopes of creating a more personal side to your business, set the timer.
As you implement these time management tips into your daily life, you may become frustrated and a little overwhelmed at first. That's to be expected.
You can't turn things around until you first squeeze a little more time out of your crazy, busy schedule to figure out what's broken, and how to fix it. Just hang in there!
As you smooth out this area of your business life, you will soon find your business running smoother and your customer complaints dropping!
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