What’s the one aspect of commerce that sets apart good customer service organizations from great ones?
The answer is simple: customer service.
The companies that have the best customer service experiences possible are the ones that end up winning in the long-term because those customers come back again and again and also recommend the brand to their friends.
Clearly, if you want your business to succeed, you need to focus on creating the best customer service experience possible in your market. If you’re looking for customer service experience tips to accomplish exactly that, then you’re in the right place.
In this article, we’ll teach you the basics of developing a customer service experience strategy that will wow your entire customer base.
Contents
1Use the Right Software Tools
The first thing to remember as you plan out your customer service experience improvement project is that you need the right tools. Your customer service is such an important part of your organization that provides a very significant ROI. Consequently, you have to be willing to invest money into the organization with excellent tools.
There are a number of different tools and tool types on the market for you to choose from. Different customer service software tools work for different industries.
If your industry has very short, transactional buying cycles, then perhaps some kind of live chat support tool is your best bet. But if you have long buying cycles wherein customers are engaged with your brand for a long time, then you’re going to want a more full-featured suite of customer service software that can track and manage customer requests over the long-term.
Figure out which of these customer experience solutions makes the most sense for your company.
2Plan the Customer Service Experience
Remember that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
If you want to have a superlative customer service experience, then you need to plan that experience out. You need a real strategy to put into place.
During the planning session, you should ask and answer most of the questions that have to do with how your customers will engage with your support team.
What channels will they use to begin a conversation? How will you respond to that conversation? What is the procedure to escalate conversations from customer service reps to managers and executive leadership?
All of these questions and more are crucial to developing a good customer service experience strategy.
3Develop Adequate Documentation
One of the best ways to provide a great customer service experience is to reduce the number of times that your customer actually has to get in touch with someone at your company to receive support. This is because if you streamline the number of requests that are coming in, your reps are able to spend more time on each request, thereby increasing the quality of service.
The best way to reduce incoming service requests is to provide external documentation that customers can reference.
For instance, create a knowledge base. Customers can then reference this external knowledge base to see if their questions can be answered before then coming to you.
4Hire Employees With Good Culture Fit
One of the most important deciders of the customer service experience is the employees that interact with your customers. You want them to impart a certain feeling to your customers. This feeling has to be consistent with the brand values that your company holds dear.
Thus, it’s absolutely crucial that you only hire customer service employees that are an excellent cultural fit. These folks must demonstrate a strong capacity to live out your core values in their daily work lives.
As a part of your interview process, introduce a culture fit interview. This is becoming more and more of a standard part of the interview procedure; there’s no reason why your company can’t also benefit from it.
5Train Employees Well
Once you have the right employees hired, it’s time for you to ensure that they are equipped with adequate training to do their job well. Train your employees on a variety of different customer service scenarios that they may encounter on the job.
Also, be sure to spend some time on software training. Your employees should be experts on how to navigate the customer service software that you bought. This means that they will be able to spend less time trying to figure out the software’s UI and more time actually serving your customers.
Be sure to listen to your employees and ask for feedback in your training process. This will help make sure that there aren’t any existing gaps in your training process as you fill in all the holes that your team identifies.
6Use Positive Language
Customers who are interacting with your service organization are already doing so from a place of negativity. Something in your product or service isn’t working as it should, and they are unhappy about it. It’s so important to use positive language to avoid this feeling of negativity from increasing.
For instance, if you have to explain a product limitation to a customer, don’t talk about how the product doesn’t have that feature and how the function can’t be completed. Instead, say that the feature is on the road map and that you are excited to deliver that functionality to the customer soon. And in the meantime, suggest a workaround.
This will help leave customers with a positive feeling after interacting with your brand. This positive feeling is what they will associate with your brand in the long-term. It’s absolutely crucial to earning repeat customers that will sing your praises to their friends and family.
This Is How You Create the Best Customer Service Experience Possible
There you have it.
Now that you know how to create the best customer service experience possible, all that remains is for you to start implementing these tips in your company today.
For more business advice, be sure to check out the rest of the articles available to read on the website before you leave!
