Customer service – you can’t put a price on how important it is. These days, customer service can make or break a company. If customers aren’t happy with the service they receive, they’ll immediately jump online and give you a one-star review, which then harms your brand reputation.
So, let’s think about your company’s customer service levels for a second. Without making too strong of an assumption, there’s probably room for improvement, right? After all, no business is perfect – even the likes of Apple and Microsoft are continuously training their employees to provide better customer service.
If this is true, you can start making improvements to your customer service today by using the following tips and tricks.
Make Learning Easy for Your Employees and New Hires
The education and training your employees receive will ultimately dictate the quality of their customer service. This is why it’s so important to make learning in the workplace as easy as possible for your employees and new hires – otherwise, the standards you desire won’t be reached.
In today’s post-covid world, companies are combining learning management systems (LMS) and learning experience platforms (LXP) to create the perfect learning strategy. This way, employees can gain the knowledge they need faster and more efficiently – whether they’re learning remotely or in the workplace. On thinqi.com, they cover the LMS vs. LXP topic in more detail.
Once you have the perfect LMS and LXP systems in place, your employees will be better trained for the tasks at hand, which is a huge win for your customers.
Provide a Variety of Customer Service Channels – A Single Phone Line Isn’t Going to Cut It!
In 2022, a company must provide different customer service channels if it wants to be a success – it’s a simple truth. Here are the main channels for you to use and optimize:
- Website chat support
- Chatbots (if you don’t want to hire human employees to handle web support)
- Social media
- Traditional landlines
- Post
- SMS
- Face-to-face in-store
At a minimum, you should be aiming to tick five of these boxes to satisfy your customers – even if you only have a small, niche audience.
Focus on a Personalized Customer Experience
Next, your company should focus on personalization.
To provide customers with a personalized experience, do the following:
- Address customers by their first names (whether this is in-store or via automated emails)
- Ask open and honest questions
- Show a genuine interest in solving customer problems
- Save information regarding customer cases so that future employees can refer back to them
Also, make sure to provide recommendations based on a customer’s purchase and search history. According to Accenture, 91 percent of consumers say they are more likely to shop with brands that provide recommendations relevant to them – so make sure to bear this in mind.
Collect Feedback
After a customer completes a transaction with you, whether it’s in-store or online, they should be given the option to provide feedback.
You can collect feedback in many different ways – just ask Apple. Interestingly, a lot of businesses are currently using email as the primary channel for this. After completing a transaction or conversation with a customer service representative, the customer will receive an email asking them to provide some short and concise feedback.
Once you begin to collect feedback from customers, you can then identify trends within the data to see where improvements can be made to customer service. For instance, you might see that customers are unhappy with the length it takes for their queries to be solved online.
