Nobody Raves About Average Customer Service

Customer is the king and this fact is never going to change anytime soon. Good customer experience is tested, implemented and result-oriented strategies devised by organizations. There are many trending arts of customer service followed by enterprises around the globe, take the best out of all and train your agents to manage great relationships with customers. This blog is all about understanding what it takes to create wonderful customer experiences. Read on.

You must be an entrepreneur or an employee working for an organization, but at some point, in time all of you are a customer of a service or a product, so we all know what defines a good customer experience. It is about good listening skills, timeliness, empathy, professionalism, personalization, capacity to solve problems, and value service showcased by a Customer Service Representation.

Don’t consider it silly, great customer experience is directly proportional to revenue flowing in. Reliable sources suggest that customers are likely to stay loyal to a brand not based on products or services that are offered but based on experiences. It is not just human experiences, but technological advancements incorporated to provide a consistent experience. It is exciting to learn how businesses can earn double in the very first year of them investing in the customer experience.

Battlefield, Where Every Brand Meets: 

• 88% of companies’ new focus is on creating unparalleled customer experiences, at this juncture, it would be foolish not to go with the trends. The results were published by Deloitte in 2017 after a survey they conducted among top contact center leaders around the globe. The result also showed a few other eye-opener results:
• 31% of organizations would start using more video chat for an average of 8% of their interactions. To be precise, audio and video platforms enable you and your customers more personal touch to the conversations. Higher satisfaction rates and increased sales can be garnered from live chats.
• 33% of contact person heads and leaders are planning to invest in robotics and process automation software to give away real-time face-to-face interactive opportunities.
• More than 3/4th of organizations strongly opine that contacting customers would more complex soon. As Bill Gates once rightly said, “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten”, you cannot close your eyes to the evolution of customer behavior and complex customer service issues arisen in the recent years.
• 93% of C&IP executives expect their contact volume to remain constant or increase in the upcoming years. This means that an operational expansion is anticipated in most middle- and top-class organizations.

Feedback-based customer experience has always proven worthy. An eBook titled “Understanding Customers”, clearly mentions how 12 positive customer experiences make up for one negative customer experience. Long wait damages your brand’s reputation, unprofessional interactions can shatter the buying decisions of your prospects and poor attention to detail can cause humongous loss.

Skills, Assorted Arrows to Reach the Goals:

• Empathy

Seeing things from other’s perspectives means ditching one-sided opinions about a circumstance and an approach to a problem. Listening actively makes conversations deeper and it would help in providing services at a more personal level. 

• Product knowledge

Many times, organizations hire customer service representatives and assign them to work on day 1. Training is completely ignored due to a lack of funds or resources. But what would be the result?

• Untrained Customer Service Executives = Unhappy Customers 

Great businesses wouldn’t usually take such risks and are happy to invest in imparting training for their employees regularly. Researchers often argue that companies should simply invest in workforce training, especially in larger developed economies because attrition is higher in such nations. Industrialized economies and other underdeveloped countries are where people would stick on for a long time in an organization for other factors such as pay, unavailability of other jobs, etc.

Shelling out some money to train people is worthy. Don’t limit the budget for just hiring, go ahead with building a business environment where everybody is encouraged to learn new things. This way skills gap can be fixed within the organization itself because employees would be multi-talented.

• Transparency 

Having transparency in a work environment gives an organization a Golden Buzzer pass by employees, customers and clients unanimously. Introducing automation and technology into the current customer support environment can improve transparency. Today’s technology is greatly affecting the flow of customer service. Face-to-face video technology, real-time messaging facilities, chatbots that help professionals, and data-driven automation technologies would be the most demanding ones. Radical transparency is going to improve your company’s efficiency, so make sure it is always followed in all the verticals.

• Clear Communication Skills

Communication is the basic unit of any customer service desk. Hire experts who understand communicating based on time zone differences and who can write well. Many times, organizations hire people who talk well but a discount of their written skills. When it comes to written communication, it is about writing emails, memos, and skills required to follow best practices in business communication.

•  Value additions bring customers closer

It is comparatively easy to convert prospects to customers than the efforts required to help them stay loyal to a business. There is no end to the ideas when it comes to customer loyalty programs. Successful strategies would result in many recurring businesses and an increase in annual turnover. Loyalty programs, member events, setting up personalized buying experience, giving customers extra value, and offering discounts/rebates, etc on services availed can give organizations a cutting edge over the other competitors.

Give your haters a hug and bring them to your loyalty customers list, perhaps it is quite easy with carefully mapped strategies. Embrace the complaints and improve the services. Jay Baer, the president of Convince & Convert, an online customer service and digital marketing consultancy clearly says in his article titled, ‘Give Your Haters a Hug’ that negative feedback is a Petri dish for improvement. So, there is no good or bad time to adopt good practices or improve the current experience that your organizations offer. Remember, the Customer is always the KING.

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