The Importance of Listening to a Customer

Every customer that calls into a business wants something different. Sometimes they want to place an order, other times they want to speak to a certain person within the company. Some may have a complaint they want heard or a customer service concern they want addressed. However, all of these different scenarios are just variations on a single theme. Ultimately, customers just want to be listened to.

Listening to your customers, and more importantly, making them feel listened to, is at the heart of customer service. If a phone call ends and the customer feels like their concerns have been heard and addressed, you’ve done everything in your power to make that customer come back again. On the other hand, if a customer hangs up the phone feeling marginalized, talked down to, or ignored, you can almost bet money on the fact that they’ll be knocking on your competitor’s door before the day is done.

In business however, most people are too busy to give each and every customer the due they deserve in order to feel like they’ve been listened to. Every staff member has other duties they need to be attending to, and at the end of the day, some customers are going to end up talking to a voicemail when they call into the average company.

One way to completely sidestep this potential pitfall is to utilize the services of a national answering service instead. By doing this, you ensure that every customer who calls in will speak to a living representative of your company, even if every full-time staff member is otherwise occupied. The members of the answering service act like a proxy-representative of your company, and most importantly, they can accomplish direct contact and make your customers feel heard.

Answering service agents don’t even need to do anything out of the ordinary in order to accomplish this goal. They just need to politely and concisely assure the customer that they have been heard and then relay that message to the appropriate party.

Using this type of service also aids your company in other ways. Sometimes, voicemails get accidentally deleted or never get listened to in the flurry of activity that surrounds most office phones. When you use an answering service, you ensure that no message gets overlooked. Every customer who has taken the time to call will have their concerns heard by the appropriate party within your organization.