You only get one opportunity to make a great first impression. These words have rung true for customer service departments for decades. But what is good customer service? How do you create a process that guarantees you make that good first impression every time?
Good customer service is the quality of timely assistance provided by a business and its employees to those who use or buy its products and services. More importantly, you provide an encounter that adds to the overall customer experience.
It sounds simple, but offering quality support is often overlooked. As a result, many organizations cannot meet the standards that their clients and users expect. Therefore, providing excellent customer service is a way for your business to differentiate itself from the competition.
Know Your Products
To offer your customers excellent support, you should first make sure your team is knowledgeable about the entirety of the products and services you offer. With this knowledge comes great responsibility. Therefore, it is essential to equip your staff with the power to fix the customer’s problems on the spot.
Ideally, your customer support employees should understand your product or service’s specific features, advantages, and limitations.
It is vital to create a process so team members are constantly learning and improving their craft. Provide regular training sessions on common questions, pitfalls, and good listening skills for your staff. You could also provide monthly huddles so team members can introduce unique problems to the group.
The most important method to improve your employee’s knowledge is developing a schedule and sticking to it. Many businesses spend a lot of time and energy training their employees to provide excellent customer support because this is the best way to ensure that customers will return.
Know Your Customers
Put your customers first, always. Customer-centric companies are on the rise, looking for people driven to deliver a truly exceptional customer experience or CX. According to recent research from Deloitte, companies that utilize a customer-centric approach are 60% more profitable than organizations that don’t. Therefore, having poor customer support is costing your business money.
To put your customers first, you first need to understand them. Do you know what your customers need and what drives them? There are several techniques to get to this critical information. The first and easiest is to ask your customers questions.
Find out what they like or dislike about your product and how you can knock it out of the park for them. You can engage with your customers on social media to ask these questions, discover their buying trends, or just read their comments on a particular product or service.
Finally, a great way to get to know your customers is to release a survey. Customer satisfaction surveys can be an impactful strategy for finding out your customer’s main issues, the best solutions to these concerns, and other feedback that wasn’t even on your radar.
Remember, brevity is your friend in creating a successful customer survey. Keep questions concise and straightforward. The survey’s main goal is to receive as much accurate information as you can. Therefore, use multiple-choice questions, true or false, with a few open-ended questions where customers can provide more specific information.
Respond Quickly
According to customer retention statistics, 66% of individuals state that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide an excellent online customer experience. Efficiency is key.
Customers want answers to their problems right away. They could be in the middle of their workday waiting on valuable information from you, so the faster you can remedy their obstacle, the better experience they will have.
If you cannot respond right away, you could set up an autoresponder that will confirm that you received their message. Include links to FAQs in this correspondence. Even though you can’t help them out right away, the customer knows you got the message and that help is coming.
The faster your team can respond to customer needs, the quicker your user base learns to trust your organization. The worst-case scenario with slow response times is that they can negatively impact a business’s bottom line for years to come.
Build Trust
The most critical element in providing good customer service is to build a relationship and trust with the customer. The only way for this is to deliver a human connection, not a machined response or repeated handoffs among team members. Personal interactions let the customer know that you genuinely care about their experience.
Allow your customer service representatives to show some of their personalities. Since customers want to work with other humans, don’t let conversations solely be about business. Be friendly, helpful, funny, and try to get to know your customer. A little personality goes a long way in building trust and overall brand loyalty.
According to Microsoft, 90% of respondents indicated that customer service is the most important aspect of loyalty to a brand.
Overall, customers still care about the price and quality of products and services; at the same time, consumers would instead encourage companies that focus on their experience while providing value beyond their initial purchase. The Microsoft data also indicates that poor customer support leads to consumers going to other brands (56%). In comparison, good customer service leads to higher brand loyalty and more return customers.
How FINSYNC Can Help
FINSYNC allows you to run your business on One Platform. You can send and receive payments, process payroll, automate accounting, and manage cash flow. To learn more about how we can help your business start, scale, and succeed, contact us today.