You may not realize it, but customer service is a potential profit center. How so? Keeping and satisfying the customers you have is almost always cheaper than marketing to new ones. Here are just a few tips on how to enhance your company's bottom line though customer service from John Goodman, author of Strategic Customer Service and Vice Chairman of Customer Care Measurement and Consulting.

1. Enhance satisfaction when customers complain

 Empower and inform – Eighty percent of all issues are basically no brainers where the solution is fairly obvious. Excellence lies in the other twenty percent of issues that are more complex. Employees must feel fully capable of handling these issues.

Provide empowerment issue by issue through flexible solution spaces (FSS). In other words, for each issue, there are a series of criteria that must be considered. Provide guidelines for decision-making which give relatively great flexibility to your customer care professionals. Within those guidelines they have free rein. Be sure your customer care reps have thorough, up-to-date information supporting your empowerment procedures.

2. Break down barriers to get a higher percentage of unhappy customers to complain

Goodman says companies need to address and remove the following four barriers:

1. Complaining is too much hassle. Submitting the complaint must be effortless. Consider how you can make the complaint process easy for customers.
2. Belief that the company will not care or fix the problem. Ensure that your customers know you want to hear about any problems they experience.
3. Fear of retribution. Make it clear that all complaints are necessary and encouraged, no matter what, and addressing the issue is the first step to resolution.
4. Lack of an easily used, preferred channel of communication. Give your customers as many options as possible to reach you from 800 numbers to live chat and everything in between.

Ready to dive deeper and learn more about creating a bottom-line enhancing service process? Download the free ebook below and get started.