Customer service for bakeries: The do's and don'ts

As the owner of a local bakery, you know that delighting your customers and giving them the most delicious baked goods is at the core of what you do. Yet, it’s not always easy to keep a pulse on what your customers need, or even answer the phone while you’re on the job.

You know that running a bakery is exhausting. From taking orders for special events, spending late nights baking and perfecting your goods to sell the next morning, and keeping up with day-to-day orders, you juggle it all. 

You’ve probably been told that technology can make your life a lot easier, from implementing a scheduling system, meal service delivery apps to service more customers, and even finding customer service tools to make your job easier.

The truth is, these customer service tools are often either too expensive or take a significant amount of brainpower to set up. The result? You waste money on a useless system or you end up training a new employee to take its place. 

Luckily, chatbots built exclusively for small businesses can help. Keep reading to learn more about why your current customer service process just isn’t working and what you can do to change it. 

Customer service strategies bakeries can ditch

There’s not a one-size-fits-all strategy to discovering the best customer service tools for your business needs. While some of the methods below may work for you, we’ll show you that you may want to rethink your current processes and discover more efficient ways to delight more customers. 

Leveraging only email

Using your business’ inbox to respond to each customer individually is both time-consuming and painful. Customer inquiries can start to pile up and if you don’t immediately respond to their needs, they might resort to your competitor across town. 

While email is a great way to respond to potential media events to promote your business, there are more efficient ways to answer FAQs and respond to your customers in a timely manner. 

Only using a phone line

The truth is, the modern customer hates making phone calls. The reason? 75% of Millennials and Get Z consumers find phone calls to be “too time-consuming” or even nerve-wracking. 

If you’re using a business phone line or even your own cell phone as the only method of contact for your business, you might want to rethink this process. According to experts, while you shouldn’t take away your phone number altogether, digitizing your incoming order requests, FAQ responses, and even scheduling process will resonate with a wider variety of customer profiles and make the process less frictionless for them as well. 

Customers today don’t want to be put on hold or even pencil in a time to reach out to your business. Coming up with a more convenient and digital-friendly option will not only open up your bakery to a larger pool of customers but help you retain more customers as well when you make their experience frictionless. 

9-5 support

There’s only so much time you have in the day. As a baker, your day-to-day is very time-sensitive. One minute could take a delicious fluffy croissant to a dry and crumbly disaster. 

While you might hire staff to manage your storefront, they are often busy fulfilling orders and taking care of in-store customers. This means that phone calls go unanswered and potential customers get turned away. According to a recent report, 57% of consumers expect the same response time at night and on weekends as during normal business hours. 

This means that if you only offer your customers support when you are available, you could be losing out on business opportunities. 

You don’t pay attention to common customer pain points

Without the right technology to collect customer inquiries and responses, you might be losing out on beneficial feedback you could use to help improve your operations.

Collecting phone calls and responding to emails can only take you so far. In a perfect world, you might record the feedback you receive on a spreadsheet to identify any customer patterns and behavior. The reality is that this takes too much manual effort and multi-tasking to even wrap your brain around. 

That’s why you should consider technology, like a chatbot built exclusively for small businesses, to help you identify important customer behavior and patterns. At the end of the day, this means less admin work for you and more opportunity for your customers to be heard. 

You rely on your employees 

Small bakeries like yours are at the forefront of every community. You and your staff do everything you can to interact with every customer that walks through your door, but weekends get busy and during breakfast hours, you probably don’t have any time to think. 

If you and your staff get overwhelmed and crabby, you’re only human. That’s why relying solely on your staff to delight every customer is ideal but outdated. Humans not only require significant training to understand your business, but they need to take breaks! 

That’s why you should consider leveraging a chatbot built exclusively for small businesses to bridge the gap between overworking your employees and retaining customers. A chatbot does not sleep or need time to take a vacation and if it’s built with your business in mind, it will only get smarter with time. 

Choose a chatbot with human superpowers for your bakery 

While there are plenty of chatbots available, Amy is the only chatbot with human superpowers, built exclusively for small business owners. Customers today expect a modern, digital-first experience where they don’t have to be placed on hold or wait days for an email response to a simple inquiry.

Integrating a chatbot built just for small businesses can be the key to not only engaging more customers but help you spend less time multitasking. At the end of the day, this means more time to focus on your products, create more recipes, and actually learn from the feedback you receive. 

Amy brings powerful AI chat solutions to everyday small business owners. With Amy, you can interact with more new customers and delight existing customers at a fraction of the cost and with less hassle. The Amy chatbot works 24/7 to better understand your customers and their needs. Installing Amy is a breeze. Whether you want to install Amy directly to your website or integrate with your favorite CRM, you can start using the Amy chatbot in a matter of minutes to impress new visitors at first sight and retain more customers for years to come.