Providing excellent, professional customer service can be difficult for any business, but especially for a home improvement business. Home improvement projects take place over a long period of time, they have a lot of moving parts, and home renovation quality and design can be subjective.
Thankfully, HFS Financial is here to give you a rundown on the best advice for providing professional customer service in the home improvement industry.
For Professional Customer Service, Watch Your Tone
Whether you are providing customer service via telephone, email, or in person, try to talk about everything using positive language. For example, you might want to say something like, “Since we didn’t know about your design changes until the last minute, the countertop you want won’t be available for another two weeks.” Instead, you could put a positive spin on the situation by saying, “I called the supplier today to tell them about the design change, and they can have your countertop ready in two weeks.”
When responding to a customer through email, make sure you sound like a human rather than a robot. A client doesn’t want to hear recycled lines or technical jargon. They want to talk to someone who is just like themself. So, think about how you can emulate their language and personality in your writing.
Learn Something from Every Complaint
The first step to appropriately dealing with complaints is to empathize. Think about how you feel when a business doesn’t perform the way you expect them to. Even if you didn’t technically do anything wrong, having a dissatisfied customer means there was at the very least a miscommunication of some kind. When people feel misunderstood, their guard is going to go up and they will have a hard time trusting you.
Take a minute to look for something you can learn from every complaint. Accept the fact that you always have room for improvement. Also, if a pattern emerges and you are getting similar complaints repeatedly, figure out what the problem is and remedy it.
After you empathize and learn something from a complaint, tell your customer exactly what your plan is to turn their frown upside down.
Provide Training and Set Standards
If your business is bigger than a one-man or one-woman show, you won’t be the only person representing your company to customers. Make sure all of your employees know how to deal with customer complaints because you might not always be there when they come up.
Go the extra mile and write down a customer service policy for your company. Make it part of your onboarding training and refer back to it as needed.
Make Contractor Financing Part of Your Customer Service
This home improvement business’s guide to professional customer service is just the beginning of things you can do to benefit your company. Up your customer service game by partnering with HFS Financial to provide contractor financing. All you will need to do is direct your customers to our 60 second application right from your website, and their project could be 100% funded within 24 business hours upon approval. We make this process quick and easy so you can concentrate on all the other ways to keep your clients smiling. Remember, at HFS Financial, “You Dream It, We Finance It!”