Five Steps to a Great Customer Service Experience
Customers no longer consider your company’s customer support staff as an extra perk after making a transaction. In fact, studies reveal that when it comes to competing in their market, almost two thirds of firms today place a high priority on the customer experience.
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Customers are frequently placed on hold or are unable to get the information they need on their own, even after spending hours looking through a company’s knowledge base.
When it comes to the overall definition of a negative customer experience, most of us can agree on a few points. However, what can we say about a positive encounter with customer service? or perhaps one that is remarkable?
We’ll define outstanding customer service in this post and explain how to offer it at your company. With a little work and direction, you should be able to stand out, set yourself apart, and perhaps even win over some of the irate clients of your rivals.
What Constitutes an Outstanding Customer Service Experience?
Customer experience, or CX, is the culmination of all of a customer’s pre- and post-sale interactions with a company. Depending on the nature of the encounter and the communication channel, there are several ways to create the perfect customer experience.
Nonetheless, the following characteristics of first-rate customer service are present:
1. It gives your clients a sense of exclusivity.
Every conversation should center on the ideas of respect for one another, individual worth, and a common future goal for you as their go-to brand. Think about the following ways you may inform your clients:
For your company, they are more than just a transaction.
Their money and time frees you up to keep working on your purpose.
Their personal path is interwoven with your professional journey.
2. It surpasses their anticipations.
An essential component of providing good customer service is setting expectations. Meeting your own expectations is the other side of the coin.
You produce a negative experience if you don’t deliver. Delivering satisfies the customer’s expectations by fulfilling the agreement—neither more nor less. They could be content, but they’re not thrilled. Why, after all, would your clients thank you for doing the task they hired you to do?
On the other hand, if you surpass the customer’s expectations, you provide the foundation for an outstanding experience from their point of view. The advantages of this sort of client satisfaction for your company are numerous.
3. It surpasses what rivals provide.
Sometimes you can believe you’re going above and above when, in reality, you’re only maintaining the standard established by your industry. There is nowhere exceptional customer service exists. You might not be satisfying your consumers to the extent that you would like to if they are aware of what your rivals provide and it is either the same or better.
For instance, if everyone in your industry gives a free 30-day guarantee, it might not be as compelling of a selling feature as you might believe. This is especially true if it is harder for the client to truly benefit from the promise than it is for them to conduct business with your rivals.
Always be aware of how your rivals are advancing the consumer experience via innovation.
4. All of this is accomplished without difficulty or annoyance.
Your clients expect doing business with you to be an easy and straightforward experience. When consumers do encounter problems, they want the resolution process to be quick, easy, and accessible through a channel that suits them.
One of the best ways to identify and remove friction spots in your customer experience is to communicate with your consumers to learn about their requirements and desires. In your company, providing for the needs of the consumer should be a continuous activity.
Methods for Developing Outstanding Customer Service
Here are some useful ways for delivering excellent customer service to help you create some best practices that center on these fundamental ideas.
1. Always say “thank you” while interacting with customers.
One of the finest methods to enhance the customer service experience is to start and conclude every client engagement with a thank you. Simple solutions are frequently the most successful.
Saying “thank you” at the beginning of every encounter lets the consumer know that you value their decision to choose your company above others.
Even if it’s not a transaction, saying “thank you” at the end of your business is just polite behavior that gives the impression that your company and its employees are well-mannered. In the future, a simple act of civility can also encourage a follow-up visit for a purchase.
2. Utilize digital tools to prioritize individuals.
People are more connected online than ever before, mostly due to the invention of the smartphone. Service providers, merchants, and eateries now have a special chance to take advantage of this connection and use it to deliver an exceptional customer experience through smartphones and other mobile devices.
In order to provide a desirable customer experience, it is also imperative that you allow consumers to control account services and features. This is because, on occasion, customers may have simple questions or issues that may be resolved through direct chat or a mobile app.
Customers with little time to dedicate to your organization will find it quite helpful to be able to place orders for goods or services independently online. Customers will become irritated and lose interest in your brand if you often refer them to your app for help.
3. Make use of sensible social media tactics.
More personal relationships may be made through social media than through any other publicly accessible resource. People may express interest in your company, brand, goods, and services at any time of day and from anywhere in the world by leaving comments and sharing them.
You should start using social media’s personal touch to improve customer experience immediately if you haven’t already. A high-level CX strategy is to use social media to give customers the impression that they are insiders and close confidants of your business.
4. Engage with your clients wherever they are.
Your customer experience plan will not succeed until you use the customer’s contact information for proactive post-transaction and post-visit follow-up. In the event that they have encountered difficulties or have come up with new inquiries after their visit, these calls and messages serve as opportunities to go over the advantages of the prospective or recently acquired goods or services.
More importantly for your CX strategy, it shows that you are still genuinely interested in their experience with your business even after they have left your store or made a purchase. Don’t allow those chances go through your fingers.
5. Get client feedback and put it into practice.
When it comes to enhancing your customer service encounter, you don’t have to hazard a guess. If you aggressively seek out feedback from your clients, they will tell you. You may obtain a sense of how satisfied your clientele is and what areas you’re falling short of their expectations by conducting an email survey or using an NPS score system.