Do you wish to drive growth for your company? Here’s the mantra to achieve the same — put customers at the center of your business plan. Moreover, the motto should be most evident in how you design customer service experiences.
After all, it helps you serve the customers most efficiently and productively — building positive impressions on customers.
Moreover, the best thing about all this is that the customer service experience is completely in your control.
Once you understand the fundamentals of customer service experience, its importance, and best practices, you will be all set to hit the ground running.
Let’s jump right into the content to learn about customer service experience from inside and out.
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What is customer service experience?
Customer service experience is essentially the emotions and sentiments associated with services customers use to resolve their problems.
From a business point of view, the idea is to provide positive service experiences to customers that lead to the successful resolution of their issues.
These service experiences can be delivered through one-on-one interactions or interactions on a more public platform.
Customer service experiences can be delivered through phone support, email support, self-help knowledge base, live chat, in-person helpdesk, and more.
The better your customer service experience, the higher your chance of getting more customers. After all, almost 55 percent of customers cite a business’s customer service reputation as a major factor deciding their purchasing decisions.
Importance of customer service experience
Here are the key benefits of implementing a customer service experience strategy —
1. Retain your customers
The average cost of retaining customers is lower than that of acquiring new ones. Extending exceptionally great customer service experience will always help retain existing customers.
If you’re consistent, customers will likely keep coming back to make more transactions.
Business owners can retain customers by making their customer service experiences more personalized, convenient, and attentive. In other words, if you’ll do good for your customers, they’ll do good for you.
2. Encourage customer loyalty
Nothing’s better than a customer loyal to your brand. To gain a loyal customer, you’ll have to rely on customer service experience as a good experience, coupled with an enticing CTA, can push customers to sign up for your loyalty programs.
Customer loyalty showcases the commitment customers have to your brand. We highly recommend you create a customer service experience that can turn into a valuable asset for your business — helping you beat the competition and encourage repeat purchases.
3. Build a strong culture and reputation
Customers tend to stick to brands that take pride in their culture and reputation. It’s all about reflecting a positive brand image by bolstering culture, beliefs, and other facts that impact customers’ psyche.
You can significantly improve your brand by creating an excellent customer service experience strategy as it leads to alignment of employees — all adhering to the same customer-centric mission statement.
However, coming up with a defined brand culture takes time.
4. Get more referrals
Customers look for brands they can trust. Providing reliable and consistent customer service quality makes it easier for your customers to recommend your products and services to other people.
Referrals are quite powerful and can significantly contribute to your bottom line.
However, consistency in the experiences is key here as providing inadequate customer service experiences to the referred customers can lead to the building of a negative reputation over time.
5. Boost sales
Having a definite approach to customer service can lead to increased sales at your company. This is because a defined customer service strategy paves the path to quick handling of customer issues.
It even helps make customers feel special and appreciated.
Incentivizing your customers with an exceptional customer service experience and coupling it with discounts, promotions, and free stuff can help reach more people and increase sales.
6. Upsell products
Modern-day customers are smart and can find out when you are trying to push a product or service at them, especially when they are making a transaction. This is called upselling.
Now, extending a great customer service efforts can help you make the process feel more natural for the customers.
As you use the approach to build trust between your brand and customers, you’ll find it easier to upsell and boost your bottom line.
7. Improve employee happiness
Contrary to popular belief, developing great customer service doesn’t just help customers. It even makes the lives of your employees easier.
A well-developed customer-centric customer service system and guidelines can make it easier for employees to deal with customers.
This is because, ideally, the system will lead to happier customers, which will lead to happier employees. So, you will be able to keep both your customers and employees satisfied.
8. Remain competitive in the marketplace
A well-designed and positive customer service experience is a major competitive advantage. This makes more sense when you are in an industry where all companies are selling almost the same product.
A good customer service experience history and reputation in such cases can be a deciding factor for customers.
In other words, as you provide support and treat your customers well, you’ll find it easier to bring in more customers and stay competitive in the marketplace.
Best practices for customer service representative
Here are the best practices you can implement when strategizing customer service experiences —
1. Know your product
This has to be an imperative if you want to convince your prospects. Your customers might have several questions about your products and services, and they expect you to have answers to all of them.
This is important because it shows how confident you are in serving them and providing the right solution.
Therefore, make sure all your customer-facing employees are well-versed with the features and benefits of products, as well as major customer pain points.
2. Solve problems creatively
You cannot expect all customer-related issues to be the same. Also, almost all customer interactions will be different and need you to maneuver accordingly.
This is why we highly recommend you hire the right people who can solve customer-related issues creatively and come up with innovative solutions.
At the same time, having a flexible and creative approach to customer service will open your company to new opportunities — eventually helping you beat competition and exceed customer expectations.
3. Practice active listening for customer satisfaction
Business-customer relationships and interactions aren’t a one-way street.
You will have to ensure that communication happens both ways and that you are available whenever customers come to you with problems.
This is only possible if you practice active listening.
What is active listening? It is a practice that allows companies to listen attentively to customer concerns and ensure the responses are designed to solve specific issues and provide customer satisfaction.
4. Manage customer expectations
You don’t want to be wrong here. Customers and prospects come to you with expectations, and some of them are developed by what you promise.
As a company trying to beat the competition and make a name for itself in the industry, you might end up promising the world to your customers.
Instead, make sure you promise only what you can deliver. At the same time, you must be willing to over-deliver to exceed customer expectations.
5. First impressions matter
Like life, first impressions matter in the world of business. This is because you only get one chance to make a first impression.
Therefore, it is crucial that you keep your customer service teams on their toes as one negative experience can push customers to choose your alternative.
We highly recommend you give your customer-facing employees enough freedom and support to create a solid first impression.
6. Personalize for great customer service experience
Are you collecting customer data? If you’re not, you’re losing the opportunity to personalize customer interactions. If you are new to business, we recommend you invest in CRM tools that efficiently collect and store customer data.
Personalization allows you to get closer to customers and encourage them to trust your company more.
How to improve and customer service experience?
Now that you are well-acquainted with the concept of customer service experience, here are the steps you can take to improve your customer service experience strategy —
1. Introduce a customer feedback management system
If you are looking to provide the best customer experience across all possible customer touchpoints, you’ll have to invest in a reliable customer feedback management system.
The software will help you create and send surveys and generate deeper insights into your customers’ experiences.
Some of the best customer feedback management software even allows integration with marketing platforms. The idea is to generate an accurate overview of your customer experience.
2. Use multiple customer service channels
Different customers would like to reach you differently. After all, there are several avenues customers can use to reach out to you. Modern-day businesses have a website, blog, contact number, SMS/text, email, chatbots, and social media.
Having multiple customer service channels gives customers the flexibility of choosing a channel that works for them. Here’s the idea — you have to make sure that customers are able to reach the customer service representative quickly and efficiently.
3. Stay prompt and proactive
Proactivity should be the norm when you’re trying to improve customer service experience. At the same time, you shouldn’t want to be reactive to customer feedback.
As a business owner, you must make sure that business-customer communication happens not just when there’s something wrong.
We highly recommend you stay connected with your customers through surveys and generate consistent feedback.
This will ensure that you have ample time to mitigate issues.
4. Ensure consistency across customer service
Consistency is a major USP that sells without fail. If you are able to create a customer service experience strategy that is customer-centric and consistent, you will find it easier to connect with the target audience and achieve in-depth insights.
At the same time, you must make sure that the communication channels are adjusted with respect to the target audience’s preferences. Consistency helps customers know what to expect from your products and services.
5. Efficiently manage customer expectations
Speaking of consistency and its connection with customer expectations, it’s crucial to mention how most instances of customer dissatisfaction are rooted in misinformation or false expectations.
We suggest business owners detect the misinformation through surveys and feedback forms shared regularly.
This will help ensure that all customer journey maps are designed logically in a way that educates customers and generates a conducive perception of your products and services.
6. Ask for customer feedback
We have published several posts in the recent past about soliciting customer feedback through more than one type of survey. This is because we prioritize customer feedback collection.
Customers’ opinions matter, especially when a wide majority of your customer base isn’t satisfied with what you have to offer.
As a business owner, you should make sure you send out Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys and Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to fathom customer engagement.
7. Genuinely care about your customers
Being genuine in your approach to solving customer issues shows how much you care about your customers.
If you are looking to achieve long-term business-customer relationships, you will have to care about your customers and take action to make them stay engaged.
Almost 80 percent of customers in the US claim that “friendly customer service” is a factor that pushes them to stay with a brand.
8. Create and track multiple touchpoints
One of the best ways to generate insights into your target audience is to make your prospects and existing customers through multiple touchpoints.
This strategy will push you to focus on details throughout the customer journey.
You can consider touchpoints like when users first visit your business website, create an account on your site, add products to their cart, pay for a subscription, purchase products, and more.
9. Empower your employees
The customer journey development/tracking, and customer relationship management contain tasks that will be performed by your employees.
While you would want your employees to acknowledge your idea to improve customer service experiences, you’d want to provide them with the freedom to make decisions.
Put the right people in customer-facing roles and give them the authority to decide how to communicate with customers and do things that make customers feel special and satisfied.
10. Seek employee feedback
Since your employees will be facing the wrath of customers, you should have a system in place that allows employees to speak freely. We highly recommend you send out Net Promoter Score and other surveys to your customer-facing employees and collect valuable feedback.
As positive customer service experiences move through positive employee experience, it is crucial that your employees are well-engaged and supported. Ensure adequate training and foster improvement across all departments.
Final thoughts!
So, how do you plan to implement customer service experiences to grow your business?
While the tips and best practices mentioned above will help, you’ll need to introduce a mindset shift that fosters increased focus on your customers’ sentiments — across all teams and departments.
Remember, a history of positive customer service experiences will eventually help your brand beat the competition. Therefore, we highly recommend you ensure every action taken at your organization revolves around your customers’ well-being.
Not just that, make sure the people you have in the company and the ones you hire understand the level of customer service experiences you want to consistently deliver.
Did you find this post helpful? Stay tuned for more informative posts in the future.