The customer experience is everything for those looking to improve their businesses. A good customer service strategy can mean the difference between bountiful profit and just scraping by, but don’t take our word for it. Apple Inc. is known for having some of the best customer service in the world, and they’re doing exceptionally well.
Customer service is often incredibly undervalued in businesses. In reality, it should be the most important factor to consider when running a business, since it’s your customers who control the bulk of your profits.
Keeping customers around isn’t as easy as you think, either. Did you know that it only takes one bad customer service experience to turn a customer against you? In addition, it takes 12 good experiences to erase that single encounter.
If you want your customer service strategy to improve, you have to rely on your resources. Customer service technology was invented to help take some of the strain off of businesses. Here are some types of software that you might consider.
1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Your goal is to keep each customer happy, right? CRM is a good aid in doing so. It’s a hub of information where you can store customer follow-ups, track emails, schedule phone calls, write down appointments, and solve customer problems.
There’s currently a lot of data being collected and analyzed regarding customer interactions. It’s impossible to decipher that information for yourself, which is why technology should be allowed to do it for you.
2. Mobile Customer Support
More than 91 percent of American adults now own a smart phone. Furthermore, no technology in all of human history has been adopted more quickly than the mobile phone. This tells us that mobile isn’t going anywhere, and your customer service strategy needs to adapt its processes to include the mobile market.
Aside from communication, the primary use of mobile phones is web browsing, but it’s not always a pleasant experience. Too many websites are not responsive to the small screen. Web pages appear with a distorted image, load slowly, or are difficult to navigate.
The solution is to seek out more advanced mobile support. Users should be able to access your website easily, navigate to different pages, search for information, and offer self-help tools that make the mobile customer experience better.
3. Live Chat
The populous has voted, and it turns out that live chat is the preferred method for communicating with businesses. Surveys show that 56 percent of adults aged 18 to 34 prefer live chat over phone conversations or email when interacting with a business.
Pleasing customers is your ultimate goal here, so it only makes sense that you offer live chat on your website. You might even take it to the next level and offer co-browsing chat, which lets the agent temporarily control the customer’s browser while they seek to solve a problem or to answer a question. It’s the convenience of having a customer service rep in the room without devoting all of your time and attention to that one person.
4. Self-Service Management
Currently, millennials hold the buying market. This group, aged 18-34, typically prefers to help themselves versus being helped by a customer service representative. In other words, they’d prefer to search for the answer and to solve it for themselves rather than to speak with a person. Implementing self-service resources is a great way to answer that desire.
Installing a good search bar that will lead the consumer to FAQs, updated blog articles, and troubleshooting is a great place to start. It’s important to note that efficient resources in self-service are still being developed, so there will be a need for company-help resources as well.
When it comes to customer service, catering to the customers’ wants is essential to success. Using the technology and resources available to you lets you offer a more comprehensive, useful customer experience that they won’t soon forget.
Completely agree with this, but feel translation software is often left out, but is incredibly important. No business can do any of these things well if they can’t effectively communicate with their customers in the language they speak.