This article is part of the school of coworking course through Archie. Make sure to check out the other articles to learn more about how to start a coworking space business.?
Introduction
Maintaining your coworking space’s brand image and reputation is crucial for long-term success. Quality customer service is one of the greatest competitive advantages for any business and is essential for the proper handling of negativity in your coworking space.
Dedicating time to building a solid customer service strategy is important for many reasons, but this article will focus on how it can help you manage difficult customer relationships and negative reviews as well as how to get more positive feedback for your coworking space.
Culture Leadership
A strong sense of community and positive workspace culture are some of your coworking space’s greatest assets. Such perks draw in a big portion of your customer base, thus it is critical that you foster your culture and community so that you can leverage its advantages. Depending on the size of your space and staff, you may want to appoint one person to be head leadership of culture whose role, much like a community manager, is to plan and handle all matters related to culture.
Having a person responsible for managing the community and culture in your space means that people know who to address their concerns and complaints, which reduced friction and frustrations. Furthermore, this person will ensure that the rules, policies, etc. of the space are known and respected by all users.
More specifically, the role of your head of culture will be to:
- accept formal complaints
- intervene in situations when necessary (member behaviour, misconduct, etc.)
- communicate and explain rules and policies
Responding to Negative Feedback
Whether you decide to go ahead with a specific hire for culture and community or choose to do it yourself, the most important thing to remember is to respond and not react to member feedback.
You must keep in mind that quality customer service is your greatest ammunition and that it is your job as a business owner to be respectful and make your member feel heard regardless of if the comments are positive or negative.
Furthermore, you should always respond to every comment. Ignoring negative feedback is never a solution and is likely to escalate into something bigger which will only cause more harm in the end. Be mindful of how you respond to comments, not every comment you be dealt with in person but more serious issues should.
Setting Guidelines
You should have in place a set of guidelines and policies for your coworking space. You will likely have policies for usage and overall member conduct in the space. That being said, you will need to provide specifics for community and culture like clear directions to follow for customer complaints and feedback such as who to talk to, where to leave comments, and so on.
Providing Support
Providing accessible and consistent support in your coworking space is a very important part of any quality customer service strategy. Things such as a FAQ page and live chat support are great ways to easily communicate with website visitors in real-time. Additionally, with live chats, if an unwelcome situation arises, a member or guest can quickly contact you.
Similar to live chats, chatbots are another good tool for customer communication. Companies typically use website chatbots to provide 24/7 customer service, collect feedback, and share basic information. This customer service tool is one of the most beneficial, especially to a small support team.
Chatbots can maximize your coworking space support availability. They can be used to quickly share links to related pages, ask for customer reviews, and answer any coworking FAQs on a 24/7 basis.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, avoiding difficult customers and negative reviews altogether is impossible when running a business. However, as we’ve seen in this article, there are things you can implement to alleviate dealing with negativity in your coworking space.
Strategic efforts to maximize customer satisfaction are critical. Focus on building a strategy around the tips provided in this article to keep your coworking members and guests happy, safe, and productive. Focusing on meeting people’s needs rather than profits, they’ll reward you with more visits.
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