Customer service is a top priority for businesses across all industries. Customers don’t find satisfaction in a great product or service alone. Today’s buyers, especially with the proliferation of digital technology, expect a personalized customer experience. They want to be listened to empathetically and expect issues to be resolved in real-time. There’s no doubt that great marketing efforts attract new clients, but poor customer service will drive them way as quickly as they came. Here are five tips for companies seeking to win customers over consistently.
Make sure your business is easy to find.
As a small business, being easily discoverable is vital for enhanced customer interaction, especially on social media. For instance, a water company servicing a local area may promote its visibility online through SEO-targeted keywords like “water delivery services near me.” The more people find this result when they turn to Google to find a water delivery service, customer interaction increases. Generally, the rationale is that customers may want to share their experiences after benefiting from a service, whether good or bad. It helps if they know where to find you every time.
Try to listen to customers properly.
As a brand, you need to listen more than you speak. It pays to pay attention. The most successful companies with exceptional customer service listen beyond the suggestion box and toll-free customer line. The more you listen to your clients, the more you’re likely to anticipate their issues even before they report them. There are several ways to offset some of these issues. Generally, creating and monitoring multiple means of communication, such as voice calls, text messages, video calls, and social media platforms, is crucial. With proper CRM integration strategies and a good CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) platform that offers your customer service agents a way to communicate across platforms, your business may be on its way to seeing and listening in several ways all at once.
Leave no customer behind.
Human beings may have a short memory, but for companies, it’s inexcusable. You can’t be that water company that forgot about a customer’s claims of impurities flowing from their tap water and into their dispenser. They might pardon your mishaps for the first time, but a second or third issue will drive them to competitors. Minor lags in your company’s operations are acceptable. However, when they shouldn’t be too severe to overwhelm you.
Generally, you can battle customer service inefficiencies with methods rooted in digital and artificial intelligence technology. Managing customer experience using analytics and automation tools is a good start. With such tools, you can develop metrics and indicators for measuring and categorizing customer data.
Similarly, a large number of companies are embracing chatbots in the U.S, marrying them with agent performance. This frees up a lot of time in customer workflow processes and boosts productivity at the call center. Other cloud migration benefits for companies include intelligent call routing and interactive voice response (IVR) for excellent customer service.
Focus on solutions.
Customers need their issues resolved in real-time. Similarly, brands also value time and money. A middle ground is an efficient customer resolution approach that costs the company less money and reduces agent-to-customer time. How is this approach possible? Well, there are several ways to solve a customer’s problem.
As much as they may vary from business to business, every solution begins with an evaluation of the problem at hand. Other processes may then follow. Companies need to first listen with empathy and then clearly communicate the solution. Carrying the customer through every step of the solution process increases transparency and reliability by way of communication.
Remember that honesty is the best policy.
Some companies undertaking their customer support duties often run with the cliché that customers only want to hear the good stuff. Customer expectations are always high, but they’re humans. Your customer is as strong as that top-level executive. Even better, loyal customers endure turbulent times when duly informed and appropriately engaged. Honesty in communication isn’t only for the purpose of CRM—companies, small or big, must honor it in order to ensure business continuity.
