An organization’s success depends on the quality of support their customers receive-both before and after buying products or services. It’s not always a hearty conversation, but the convenience and the quality of your service determine a lot of your customer success journey. The objective is to make your customers feel at ease and have an enjoyable experience with your brand. Precisely, customer service is more about resolving a customer’s problem and closing tickets than selling products. Beyond delivering instant support and taking care of customer problems, your support agents need to create an impact on your customers.
An organization’s success depends on the quality of support their customers receive-both before and after buying products or services. It’s not always a hearty conversation, but the convenience and the quality of your service determine a lot of your customer success journey. The objective is to make your customers feel at ease and have an enjoyable experience with your brand. Precisely, customer service is more about resolving a customer’s problem and closing tickets than selling products. Beyond delivering instant support and taking care of customer problems, your support agents need to create an impact on your customers.
Today, every business knows that customer service is a key area of any business organization. It plays a strategic role to drive an organization’s success.
Customer retention is the primary objective of every company. When customers are happy- they are more likely to do business with the brand/company. And when you keep your current customers happy through extraordinary customer service, it reflects in your business growth. Also, it is easier to sustain current customers instead of attracting new ones because that would knock the expense chart.
Customer service differentiates your brand from your competitors- competitors who come from your industry. The service team does more than just answering questions- they personalize each experience for the customers. Even customers agree that the service experience is as vital as a company’s products or services.
With continuous bad experiences, customers will eventually abandon the brand. For a brand’s reputation, great customer service is crucial.
As loyalty is a brand’s best friend- service leaders must put attention to offering impeccable customer service. Here are 7 practices that will help you to empower the team, leverage the right technology and meet customer expectations in a more balanced way.
Connect Customer Service To Broader Organization
Most customers expect harmonious interactions throughout a business. They want all departments to be on the same page- so that customer interaction is in tune across every touchpoint. Customers look for continuous interactions- not redirects toward other teams where they have to repeat the information. To have a connected source of information across the departments, companies rely on CRM system these The CRM system will give a detailed view of every customer interaction with your company. Therefore, everyone in the team has relevant data to know about customer details and queries on the screen. Therefore, they will know how to help the customer and if required, they can connect to another department to resolve the issue.
Offer Support Through Every Channel
When you want to excel- you must offer wonderful customer service from every channel- mobile, text message, email, and social media. No matter what channel a customer is using- he will want convenient, high-quality, and fast support.
Voice
Voice calls remain the top channel to have interaction between the customer and the service team. However, in a digital channel, a seamless connection between CRM and cloud calling becomes a survival imperative. Representatives get call information on the computer screen- while AI transcribes the complete interaction in real-time. It keeps the focus on the customer.
Mobile
Today, more service organizations have observed that their messaging and mobile app usage upped quite a notch. However, mobile offers asynchronous communications- so customers and reps have access to all the past interactions. It helps them to stay connected for an extended time.
After voice, and phone, another favorite service channel is email. Email is convenient and gives the customers written records of their conversation along with the add attachments option. When you have a good CRM system, you can easily turn the interaction into a case.
Social Media
Now, over 70% of organizations use social media channels. It’s up to you to integrate both marketing and customer service data for the teams to get a particular view of the customer. It will help them to collaborate better and determine the right steps when the customer reaches out with an issue.
Chatbots
The use of chatbots has been on a rise since 2018. As chatbots use AI systems to analyze data while answering routine questions- they can answer back within seconds. The chatbots share relevant information based on the customer’s request. In case it is a complex request, the chatbots connect the customer to a representative for further support.
Self-service Channels
Your customers will use self–service channels to get fast answers to their simple queries. That’s why, the customer portal, customer community, and help center are three pillars of self-service channels. It eliminates the customers from reaching out to you via other channels. Many customers prefer self-service to solve simple matters. When customers choose self-service channels- it reduces case volume.
Video
Sometimes, few cases require face-to-face interaction- it can happen via video call. For example- reinstalling software or replacing a part of the equipment on your own. That’s why there’s a rise in video support at various organizations. If your organization offers visual remote assistance- customers can connect to any agent or technician using video. With expert guidance, they can resolve an issue on their own.
Representatives express that there’s difficulty in striking a balance between speed and quality. The cases are directed to the right agents- thanks to omnichannel. Managers get a detailed view of every activity of the contact center. It ensures that agents are dealing with the right cases- according to their availability and skills.
Another way of helping the reps to meet expectations is introducing automation. With automated workflows, agents are guided to take the right steps and complete an action. It is possible to repurpose the workflows/steps and help customers to execute a process on their own.
Today, every customer service rep must learn- active listening, exhibit empathy, deliver a wonderful, personalized experience to customers and showcase authentic product/service knowledge. Additionally, they must solve the cases swiftly. That’s why, over a half percentage of reps would agree- they need better training to do the job, exceptionally. It is important to provide continuous training to support the team while they take on complex cases. That’s why you must focus on increasing their hard and soft skills:
Interpersonal Skills
Be it in our personal space or professional space- how we make people feel matters a lot. The customer service team must learn the communication basics- positive language, listening, empathy and persuasion. Encourage them to think of any case from the customer’s standpoint.
Product/Service Knowledge
When it is time for a new release or update- inform all the employees about the product or service. Customer service reps are an integral part of a company- encourage them to learn about the products, services, and company protocols minutely. Provide them with opportunities to collaborate and shadow experts and improve their product knowledge.
Technical Expertise
The customer care members must be intuitive with the office technology. You can train them on new features and functions. After the training ask them about their feedback to improve the overall employee experience.
Even though the customer service team works one-on-one with their customers- there needs to be a professional camaraderie. For the members to work in a balanced state- maintaining open lines of communication and collaboration is important. Especially, if the customer service team is working remotely- regular standups are great to stay connected.
When customer service members are encountering individual complex cases- you can encourage them to collaborate to solve them. With the collaborative approach, reps and skilled experts come together to bring solutions to complex cases. Teams track the logs to solve particular cases for next time- if similar cases come up. It’s beneficial for new hires and junior employees as they gain new skills through the previous examples.
After a customer service rep solves an issue- they can take their relationship even higher by cross-selling and upselling. AI can help by analyzing customers’ data- like, previous orders and whether they buy or just check the products and services, etc. According to the data, AI can recommend relevant products and services to your customers.
Besides adding to your ever-growing revenue stream, the customer service team supports your entire business strategy. Every day, the customer service team retrieves customer insights and feedback. Why not ask the service team to be present at company meetings- and showcase customer feedback? The insights can lead to product improvements and innovations.
During the time of handling your customer- time is crucial. But that won’t unveil the whole story. You need to understand various ranges of metrics for understanding your customers better. Also, you would want to know their relationship with the company overall. Here are five essential service metrics to keep in mind to evaluate business success via customer service:
Customer Satisfaction
For customer service teams, high customer satisfaction is the “sweet melody”. To measure customer satisfaction- send out quick surveys to know how happy your customers are after interacting with the team.
Customer Retention
After providing customer service and customer disconnecting- does the customer come back to shop from the brand? Did the customers have a good experience or a frustrating experience?
Customer Effort
Do you have to put too much effort into resolving customer issues? Instead, you can create some easy-to-understand articles and optimize them accordingly to help customers resolve the issue faster.
Revenue
To determine growth in revenue collection- you should review the contact center analytics for quality customer service. Observe whether it is contributing to better sales per customer or a higher number of transactions.
Service-level Agreement Performance
Most companies offer service-level agreements for their contact center- for example, how long customers should remain on hold. To measure the improvement rate- compare the SLAs against the real performance based on contact center analytics.
The sentiment of experiencing good customer service never gets old. It’s the magical antidote for retaining customer loyalty. The service team is the core department of a business- they understand the customer on another level. The customer service team holds the power to make customers feel understood and special- by meeting their expectations. That’s a clear win-win for the team and organization.
