How to Make Your Retail Business Stand Out With Awesome Customer Service

By Laura Norman

It’s only 15 days until Black Friday and smart retail businesses are already ramping up their customer support. What can small businesses do now to make sure they are ready? We sat down with Anthony Soohoo, Co-founder and CEO of fast-growing furniture retailer Dot & Bo, to talk about the importance of customer service to his business, and his advice for retail companies starting their customer service strategy.

What is your vision for Dot & Bo?

Dot & Bo is a uniquely curated shopping experience, making modern design accessible and inspiring people to create their perfect homes. We believe that designing your home is more than just a shopping experience — we view content as entertainment, similar to creating a television series. You can think about us as HGTV meets your favorite furniture store.

We help consumers better understand and explore their personal style through an engaging, narrative experience.

What’s your approach to customer service?

At Dot & Bo, we’re focused on trying to create a new way to build customer relationships — far beyond simply answering questions. A good portion of our sales starts from a customer inquiry. We use Desk.com to turn every customer interaction into an opportunity to build a customer relationship, which ultimately is good business. We’re able to provide better service to our customers, which translates into higher repeat purchases and more valuable customer relationships.

What advice would you give other retail startups getting support started?

Delivering excellent customer service was important to us from day one but it wasn’t initially apparent which tools we needed to deliver this experience. As our business grew and evolved, it became more apparent that we needed integrated customer service and CRM deliver the experiences that we envisioned. By connecting Desk.com with Sales Cloud, we’re able to share customer data between our customer experience and sales teams to ensure we’re directing customers to the appropriate responses.

See how Dot & Bo uses Desk.com and Salesforce to offer amazing customer support: http://www.desk.com/customers/dotandbo