We all know that the customer is king. They are the lifeblood of our businesses. Without them, our businesses will fail. It makes sense then to exert much effort into making them happy and keeping them satisfied. One way to do that is to put them first.

There are many ways to prioritize our customers, but it can be hard to tell the myths about customer service from the strategies that will provide the most value for you and your customers. To assist you, we’ve put together 5 of the top tips and tools to get you started.

Get feedback

Customers love it when they feel valued. You can make them feel how important they are to you by listening to what they have to say. Their thoughts and experience about your products and services will give you valuable information that you can use for further improvement and innovation.

Gathering customer feedback nowadays can be made easier and faster through online surveys. Tools such as Survey Gizmo and Survey Monkey, for instance, allows you to create surveys quickly and easily send them to customers via email.

Keep customers up-to-date

Speaking of email, it can also be used to keep your customers up-to-date. They will appreciate any news about upcoming events, rewards, promos and products that they can look forward to.

Email newsletter tools such as Mailchimp lets you create newsletters with easy-to-use templates that you can send to your customers. It even allows you to create customer groups that lets you send personalized emails only to a specific target market.

Be proactive

Customers dislike waiting a long time for their issues to be fixed. They want quick and accurate solutions to their problems, which you can offer easily with a help ticket or help desk system. These systems allow a company to predict issues, enabling them to work on solutions before problems arise.

Systems such as Service Cloud, for instance, are able to track issues from beginning to end and gives your customers notifications on the progress, letting them know that you are on top of everything.

Provide multi-channel customer support

Customers these days want to be able to reach you fast. Providing your customers with multiple ways to contact you will lessen frustration on their part and will help resolve more problems and issues in a day.

Social media is a great tool to use for customer service because almost everyone has gone digital and is on at least one platform. Twitter is currently one of the most actively used social media platform for customer service around the world.

Reward loyalty

While it’s always good to acquire new customers, it actually costs businesses 5 to 10 times more than it does to sell to an existing one. Current customers also spend 67% more than new customers, which means that businesses must take great efforts into rewarding loyalty.

There are many different types of customer loyalty software available these days. There are solutions that track customer purchases, record points earned, and even categorize customers into different loyalty levels. They make things easier for businesses not only to give rewards to loyal customers, but also to establish a long-term relationships with them.

These are just some of the top tips you can use to help you put your customers first. The key is to find out what matters most to your customers. Having the right tools will also help you provide them with better customer service.