Customers expect a great deal from companies. Dependable products, social media engagement, and excellent customer service performance. Modern customers expect a personalized interaction with customer support throughout the entire purchase experience.
It’s not enough to say your company values the customer experience. You will need to implement customer service improvement strategies to be sure your team knows why customer service is so important and how to properly perform up to your expectations. Consider these customer service tips to start the transformation process in your business.
Engage with reviews
Reviews left on sites like PissedConsumer.com or other customer experience sites are invaluable. Online reviews let customers share their experiences, both good and bad, and nine out of ten would-be customers are reading those reviews.
Consumers shouldn’t be the only ones reading through the recent customer experiences on a reviews website. Your team should be interacting with those customers. If a customer has a negative experience, publicly apologize and offer a way for the customer to interact with you to find a solution. Consumer reviews are a gift – they allow you to showcase your customer service and company problem-solving to a full audience.
Create metrics to measure satisfaction
You can’t gather good data or track improvement without some sort of measure. Create a metric to help you track customer satisfaction and the quality of your customer services. You might consider tracking customer service scores on short surveys, the percentage of negative or neutral responses, the average time it takes to resolve an issue, or how long it takes to contact a customer who leaves feedback online through a review website or social media.
Train your team to be empathetic
One of the best ways to improve customer service is to ask your team to experience what the customers are. Your customers can tell when your team is being trite versus when they really want to be helpful and make a customer leave the experience feeling better.
Work with your team to directly teach the importance of empathy – when your customers are frustrated, your team should feel frustrated on their behalf. Simply connecting with customers on an emotional level can create a positive experience for the customer and deescalate emotional moments.
Encourage the customer’s voice
Don’t pressure your customers to only give you five stars or stay silent. Instead encourage customers to share their actual viewpoints and suggestions for improvement. There are many opportunities to let your consumers use their customer voice to help you improve.
Track transactions and ask for simple feedback on various stages of the process. Follow up with customers for a quick survey or ask them to stay on the line for a bit of feedback. Send coupons or discounts in exchange for honest feedback once or twice a year. And once you have good information from your customers, aggregate the data and use it to improve.
Let software help save time and effort
Using software like interactive chatbots to help organize customer service interactions can save you time (and therefore money) and can help some customers find immediate answers.
Once the software has done its work, your team can focus on working through the more complex interactions with customers. Frustrated customers want to interact with humans, and software can help your customers connect with the right human in the right department more quickly.
You can’t have great customer service without a great customer service team. Focus on quality screening and hiring practices and devote time and energy to making sure your team is trained and supported. If you give your team what they need to be successful, they, in turn, can provide the support your customers need.
