Tag Archives: superior customer service

BBB Merchant Services Reviews

BBB Merchant Services Reviews [2023 Update]

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When you start a new business, it is important to fully understand that trust and credibility are essential to the success of your company. Trustworthiness should be established as quickly as possible in order to draw in new customers and keep them for the long term. As the newest merchant on the block, you will have to compete with established competitors, so anything you can do to reassure customers will only serve to improve your business.

How BBB Merchant Services Reviews Can Help Your Business?

With all of this in mind, you may want to consider registering your business with the Better Business Bureau (BBB). It is extremely beneficial to your business to establish and maintain a high ranking with them. If you can accomplish this, you will help assure potential customers that your products and services are worthy of their trust. While there are many ways to establish credibility, this post will only discuss how to use BBB merchant services reviews as a means of establishing a credible business brand.

All registered businesses are ranked, which is expressed on a scale from A+ to F (A+ being the highest and F being the lowest). Let’s briefly explore some of the factors that impact BBB rankings in order to get a better understanding of what you will need to do to establish a good rank.

The first factor that can serve to boost your rank depends on you providing as much background information about your business as possible. Some of the information that the BBB will be looking for includes the products or services that you provide. This should be the easiest information to disclose, since you have likely already determined what your products or services are and how they can benefit your target customers.

The length of time that your business has been operating will also have an impact on your rank. This is one area where your established competitors will have a slight edge, but don’t be discouraged. Every startup business has to face this hurdle, but with a little hard work and time this issue will soon become a thing of the past.

The type of business that you own can also affect your BBB ranking. If you own a business that sells a product or service that has historically produced an unhappy customer base, you will be unable to earn higher than a C ranking. You should choose a product or service that you can proudly stand by in order to avoid this low ranking cap.

Customer satisfaction is the final factor discussed here that affects your BBB ranking, though there are others. The importance of having satisfied customers cannot be stressed enough. BBB merchant services reviews are welcomed and all complaints are taken into consideration by the Better Business Bureau. If you are contacted because of a customer complaint, be sure to resolve the issue as soon as possible in order to help maintain a good ranking. Remember not to take any complaints personally; rather, look at each complaint objectively and determine if there is any way to improve customer satisfaction.

So if you decide to register your business with the BBB, stay focused on achieving the goal of an A+ ranking. Customers can be sent to the official BBB website of the business so they can see just how trustworthy your business really is.

Customer Service: Help Desk Stress Test

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Today The Official Merchant Services Blog continues its special two-part series on Customer Service. We can’t stress enough how essential it is to focus on Customer Service –– especially now during the holiday shopping season when your business may be barraged with a lot more customers who have a lot more questions.

Yesterday, we shared with you a blog from Lauren Carlson at Software Advice. The blog gave detailed tips on how to prepare business and its customer support team for the holiday shopping season. Today we bring you the second half of Carlson’s customer service saga which focuses on utilizing the holiday season as a way to stress test your help desk.

Carlson suggests that “the holiday season represents a perfect laboratory for examining your business, as well as your performance at each point of customer contact.”

This is a compelling concept. As Carlson says, the holiday season gives you a chance to analyze your business –– especially the customer support side of it –– at super speed. Doing so lets merchants identify high performance areas that are effective under the added stress of the holiday season, as well as get some insight into areas that may need some improvement. To get merchants in the mindset of how the microcosm of the holiday season can fuel some quick on the spot analytics Carlson asks: “So you had 72 percent first-call resolution rates in August. Great. What about the day after Christmas?”

Carlson keys in on five areas of support that companies should examine during their holiday season to gauge their help desk.

How Effective is That Training?

Many merchants add seasonal help for the holiday shopping rush. It’s a tried and true method for the retail industry, for example, to take on some extra help at the end of the year to push through all that added hours and increase in customers. Carlson suggests this can be a catalyst for analyzing employee onboarding –– and get a good look at how effective your company’s system is for training and preparing new support staff.

She says “Companies should use this opportunity to examine the success of their training techniques, as well as the usability of their system.”

It’s really sound advice to keep track of your support staff’s effectiveness, and the holiday season definitely gives a merchant a focused period of time to quickly measure the staff’s performance.

How Well Do You Deal With Surprises?

The next area in help desk performance that Carlson says a company should measure during the holiday shopping season is something called The Collaboration Period. Carlson describes the first nine months of the year as a build-up or preparation period for a business. Mitch Lieberman, of Sword Ciboodle, calls that period the Coordination Period in Carlson’s blog. But, according to Lieberman, the holiday rush shifts into the Collaboration Period. Carlson quotes Lieberman as saying “Collaboration is when something is outside what could or should have been easily coordinated. Are you ready to collaborate on these emergency issues that you didn’t predict?”

Essentially, merchants can use this time to study how well support staff deals with surprises. How well can they go off script? How effectively can they cope with issues that crop up that weren’t prepared for and which aren’t on an FAQ or a PDF or a Guidelines e-mail.

Where Do the Problems Get Handled?

The next area of help desk effectiveness that Carlson suggests merchants should look at is peak load management. Businesses that bulk up with some seasonal help during the holiday rush tend to train those new employees on the basic level of support. They get training to help them stick to a script, deal with the first tier of issues in a protocol, or use the FAQ that was designed for the holiday season –– all really basic stuff. The intent being to keep the easy stuff out of the way of the veteran support team members, who are then expected to effectively handle the harder issues.

Carlson says some interesting statistics can be gathered through this dynamic: “Measuring the percentage of first-call resolutions compared to the percent of calls escalated will help to inform your peak load strategy. “

What’s Your Worst Case Scenario?

The next area Carlson says companies should analyze harkens back to the boy scouts mantra of “Be Prepared.” Carslon says “assume something bad is going to happen. It’s not pessimism. It’s good business. If you assume disaster will strike, you will have an emergency response system in place that’s ready to manage the disaster on all channels.”

It’s never good when disaster strikes. But it’s a much heavier burden on a merchant when disaster strikes during the high pressure holiday shopping period. So this is a good time period to gauge what a company’s emergency response process is. And, if things do go bad, get an up front look at how effective that protocol is. Being proactive, Carlson suggests, is the best approach. Use this time period to analyze your emergency procedures and tweak them to be the most effective they can be.  As Carlson puts it, “having proactive procedures mapped out for unforeseen emergencies will not prevent call spikes, but it can lower the spikes to a manageable amount.”

Are the Customers Satisfied?

The core element of your customer support team, and your help desk, is customer satisfaction. Is the customer happy? That’s what it all comes down to. Companies should be measuring customer satisfaction year-round. And Carlson’s blog concedes that point. But Carlson points out that the holiday shopping season heightens the importance of customer satisfaction. This is something The Official Merchant Services Blog has discussed during our series on holiday shopping as well. The stakes are higher during the focused frenzy that happens after Black Friday, so you need to make sure you’re keeping even the most basic tenets of customer service in mind at all times.

Carlson asks the question, “you might have great satisfaction rates during low-volume times of year, but is your support team still on par when things get hectic?”

She suggests something as simple as a survey of your customers asking how you did during the holidays –– basic feedback.

Host Merchant Services likes the idea of reaching out to the customers for feedback. It’s an effective way to continue to maintain the long-term relationship building goal of customer support. Or, simply put, it’s a nice way to let your customers know you value them and their input. HMS suggests utilizing your social media tools for a survey like this, as you can quickly interact with your customers through those tools and they can help you track and analyze the responses.

Conclusion

This is an effective checklist of ideas for merchants to monitor their customer support capabilities. There are some concrete suggestions here on ways to collect data that will help shape a company’s goals for delivering quality customer service. Carlson gives a lot of good tips in both parts of her series. The Official Merchant Services Blog is glad she shared these with us and hopes you find them useful too.

If anyone else has some tips or suggestions on how to improve customer service now in the holiday shopping season or any other time of the year, feel free to share in the comments section.