During the 10th session of Cytonn eHub Season 2, held on 4th November, participants were trained on “Providing the best client service”. Mariam Muhando, an investor in Cytonn and the owner of Cafelatta Coffeee lounge, a coffee and pastry shop located in Nairobi CBD, facilitated the session. The session was aimed at educating the participants on the importance and effects of excellent client service and the best way to manage client relationships.
“Customer experience is the entirety of interactions with a customer of a company and its products. Always categorize your clients into either customer buys, that is a onetime buyer, a returning customer who buys your products more than once and finally a repeat customer who will buy your products on a frequent basis,” she explained. She insisted that to get a business to succeed, the business will need to make more repeat customers.
“The factors that increases the chances of turning a first time client into a repeat customer include; good pricing, time management, added value associated with the product, customer experience, availability and accessibility. However, poor client services, failure to keep promises, lack of communication and poor problem solving skills drives customers away,” she emphasized. Mariam took the participants through a ‘customer-experience improvement’ plan, giving the following guidelines towards improving client service and customer experience in one’s business:
- Ensure that your employees believe in the business. This way, they will value its customers and endeavor to give them the best service and experience,
- Take time to understand your clients’ needs, and ensure that your products and services meet these needs
- Perform a client experience audit from time to time. The results from the audit should guide you on aspects of the business you need to maintain, change or improve,
- Continuously seek feedback from your clients, especially on a new product or service, use the feedback given to improve your offerings and communicate to the clients on the actions taken to improve a product or service, following their feedback,
- Maintain a Customer ‘Bug’ list, which is a list of the problems your clients have and a description of how to prioritize solving them,
- Identify the customer touchpoints in the company and ensure that these areas are handled by people with customer service experience. Customer touchpoints are departments or people through which your clients are in contact with the company,
- Finally, continually evaluate and improve the plan where necessary.
Mariam concluded the session by emphasizing that a business should always seek to exceed its clients’ expectations by improving on service delivery and ensuring that the customers’ needs are met. Cytonn eHub training sessions are held every Saturday. The expected guest speaker for the next class will be Raphael Macharia, CEO at Smoothtel &Data solution Ltd who will facilitate the session on “Mentorship and Networking.”
