A global company with strong Irish roots, you can imagine that our employees enjoy celebrating St. Patrick’s Day every year. The holiday is reminiscent of “the luck of the Irish,” but when it comes to our CX services and offerings, luck should not play a significant role with partners and customers.
How often do we hear friends and family boast they were “lucky” to have a good customer service experience? Customers should not feel “lucky enough” to get in touch with a brand; rather they should have individualized and consistent experiences at every touch point – whether that’s online, social, in person or with a customer service agent.
There are a few ways your company can make your customers feel lucky all year long. Take it from Chug Abramowitz, VP of Customer Support and Social Media and Marketing at Spotify, who announced that 99% of their customers are happy. Creating a beautiful customer experience starts with the following:
Find your customers before they find you
Before your customer can reach out to you with an issue, it’s important for your CX teams to check in with them regularly and see if they’re satisfied with your product or services. Seeking out an issue, before one comes about, shows proactivity and sets companies apart from competitors.
In addition to human services and chatbots, companies are using social media to search for customer complaints on the internet. According to a study by NewVoiceMedia, in 2017, US companies who offered a poor customer experience lost $62 billion in revenue. By seeking out issues, your company can target those who need immediate customer support and avoid major revenue losses.
Use the right tone of voice
Every company is different in terms of how they interact amongst themselves, and how they communicate with customers. Some have a more casual tone built into their culture, and it’s an effort to maintain this communication consistency with your employees and your customers. Are you an easy-going company, or more conservative? Either way, that tone should be portrayed through all levels of the business, so the proper customer service can be carried out, no matter at what level.
Through different forms of communication, such as email and social, tones may need to be played up differently. While email may be the best platform to discuss issues in depth, companies tend to have more creative responses on social media. Be sure to own your voice to create a unified experience across platforms.
Have a “positive active attitude”
In training your customer service agents, it’s no longer enough to check off a box that a customer was serviced, rather these customers need to know that agents are dedicated to helping them throughout the process. This also means offering consistency across agents and chat platforms. According to a study by Kampyle, 87 percent of customers think brands need to work harder to provide a consistent experience. When agents can put an emphasis behind being supportive (it’s in the job title) they’ll be better suited to positively solve customer problems – even in the trickiest of situations.
Put your best agents at the heart of scaling support
As your company manages customer inquiries daily, you’re also working to scale the business, and acquire new customers. As business priorities grow, and the number of customers increases, it’s even more crucial to have a strong customer support team to manage additional inquiries. Having a strong frontline team is necessary to creating a “lucky” customer experience year-round, and at various stages of the company’s growth. Setting up strong processes and employing experienced agents will help companies better manage CX. Each of your agents should have the same background when joining a customer service call or chat, allowing the customer to walk away with a lucky CX all year round.
Being the best, not being the first
As technology advances, companies can invest in solutions that can streamline or automate the CX process. However, is your company ready to purchase these technologies? Do you value automation over human communication? The upcoming years will be a learning process for companies, to research and use humans versus bots at different levels throughout CX. Business strategy and cost comes in to play, and you must analyze what quality of service you can provide to your customers through the options that are available today.
Next time we talk about “luck,” let’s hope it’s only regarding St. Patrick’s Day, and not in relation to one out of every few friends having a positive customer experience. Positivity starts from within a company, and it’s your responsibility to transfer that positivity to customers.
