If you run a web hosting company, now may be the perfect time to overhaul your company’s customer service. In fact, if you don’t have any good reason not to overhaul your customer service, now may be a very good time to do so.

Firstly, overhauling doesn’t necessarily mean taking everything you have and throwing it out. It simply means that you are starting a series of big changes when it comes to customer service. There is always room to improve and you should always be looking for ways to make changes that will help improve your customer service experience.

Before doing any major changes, analyze the situation your company is currently in. Are there major changes going on? Are you really understaffed? Is the company experiencing financial trouble? Events like these would not make for an ideal time for a customer service overhaul. The best time to overhaul anything is when your company is going ahead as expected and nothing major is happening. It’s pretty hard to make your customer service worse, so don’t worry about that happening.

Once you have established that it is a good time to overhaul your company’s customer service, the first step is to take a customer service satisfaction survey. Ask questions about how satisfied people are with the customer service that is being provided, how likely they are refer your company to a friend, and how likely they would be to renew their hosting package based on their customer experience. This survey should be sent out to a majority of customers. Give the customers an incentive to take the survey (i. e. one random survey participant gets a free Xbox) and ensure the survey doesn’t take more than 5 or 10 minutes.

It is important to reward employees who provide good customer service

When the survey is done, you’ll have an idea about where you currently are. Once you’re done with that, it’s time to start making changes. Here are some great things to change to begin your customer service overhaul:

• Update your existing knowledge base and help desk’s pre-defined responses.
• Have existing staff members go through additional training. Don’t limit training to strictly technical material, but also teach service etiquette.
• Change around your welcome emails.
• Invest in additional self-help resources (i. e. flash tutorials and expanding your knowledge base).
• Re-look your current customer service policies. Eliminate the ones that aren’t completely needed and/or that make the customer’s life harder.
• Reward employees who provide great customer service.
• Implement per-ticket (or per-phone call) interactions surveys. That way, you can track how each person is doing and reward them accordingly.

Those are just some of many things you can do to overhaul your company’s customer service. The most important thing to remember is that improving your company’s customer service is something that you must do everyday. It can’t be a theme of the month. If it is, you won’t get anywhere.