Last updated on October 19th, 2023
As it said, it takes months to find a customer but seconds to lose one. Customer service plays a crucial role in your business success. Whether you’re a small startup or a big multinational company, it’s unrealistic to survive if you don’t prioritize your customer services. Here, we’ve listed the top ways to provide excellent customer service in your company.
When the Internet-led market was in its initial stages, marketing and promoting businesses was way easier. You could rely on the features and functions of your services to catch up to the competitors and create a standing in the market.
Now that we are living in digitally advanced times, can you imagine your company’s services selling themselves?
Of course, the prime focus is still the service quality, which is critical to satisfy your customers and retain their loyalty. However, as digitization drives more and faster disruptions, the need to go beyond the focus of delivery has become incessant.
Today, customers increasingly desire convenience. They no longer desire satisfaction but look for customer delight.
Ken Blanchard, an American author, and business consultant, quotes, “Just having satisfied customers isn’t good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create raving fans.”
The real question is….
What is the trick to do so? How do you create an experience for your customers that they leave happy and want to tell others about your business?
The answer lies in yet another quote by Connie Elder, a spokesperson, and CEO of a beauty company, “Excellent customer service is the number one job in any company! It is the personality of the company and the reason customers come back. Without customers, there is no company!”
Customer service is often not considered as important as other business functions. However, most of the high-end financially independent businesses are those that are customer-centric and incessantly focus on excellent customer service.
After all, no matter the industry your business belongs to, customers want to feel important. To show that you care about them, customer service should naturally be a major priority in your day-to-day schedule.
In today’s blog, learn why customer service is vital for your business and how you can provide excellent customer service to grow your business.
Why Is Customer Service So Important For Your Company?
01. It Represents Your Brand
In the digital-led world, not every customer gets to interact with your business directly. In this case, your web and social media presence tell your customers about your business. Amidst this, your customer service is the only way in which individuals get to interact with businesses.
Your customer executive has the power to drive the conversation and influence the perception of your business in the customer’s minds. They represent your brand, your services, your values, mission, and culture.
Since there is no other direct communication channel, customer service becomes an important medium to create your brand image.
02. It Reduces Customer Churn
When you provide excellent customer service to your customers, they feel happy and satisfied. This positive experience pays off when customers reach out to you again for your services. It is how you develop the trust of the customers and build a loyal customer base.
As a result, your customer retention rate increases, and your customer churn rate decreases. It is a good sign since capturing new customers requires more time, money, and effort as compared to retaining existing customers.
03. It Brings New Customers
When humans have a good experience, they naturally tell about it to their friends or family so that they can also benefit from the brand they trust. It’s no different with customer service.
77% of customers share their positive brand experience with others. When they refer your service to others, you gain new customers. It is the cheapest form of word-of-mouth marketing.
5 Ways To Provide Excellent Customer Service To Your Clients
01. Respond Quickly
According to research conducted by SuperOffice, the average response time to respond to customer service requests is 12 hours and 10 minutes.
Let’s suppose you wish to get your brand logo designed and are browsing through different companies online. After shortlisting five companies based on the quality of service, you text each of them asking about the prices.
How long are you willing to wait to get a response from the companies? Definitely not half a day, right?
The customer requests are time-sensitive. Whether it is a complaint, a question, or feedback – responding on time is crucial.
Your customers will not wait for hours to hear back from you – they will simply jump to another company that’s willing to serve them by valuing their time. Client portal software, in this case, can help you immensely in engaging your customers. You can improve customer satisfaction and optimize processes efficiently, while minimizing the need for direct human interaction.
The same research also states that 46% of customers expect companies to respond faster than 4 hours. 12% expect a reply within 15 minutes.
The most important attribute of a good customer experience, according to the customers themselves, is a fast response time, states the CMO council. Whichever communication channels you use – text, email, phone calls, or voicemail – do not procrastinate and reduce your response time.
Additionally, many companies explore a customer satisfaction platform that can help them build meaningful customer relationships, reduce customer churn and improve customer experience. Such a platform provides and manages chatbots, text and videos to keep track of incoming communication from a single dashboard.
Also, understand what a reply is. Just responding with a statement within minutes isn’t helpful. Your reply should add value and solve the problem of the customers.
Here are The Measures You Can Take To Reduce The Response Time Of Your Business
- Use email responders to let the customer know you have received their request and help is on the way.
- Implement customer support tools. When you have a previous chat database handy, you can help the customers in a better way.
- Set up time-based email alerts to avoid losing emails in the system or response times being delayed for much longer than they need to be.
- Just like emergency patients are treated first, prioritize the time-sensitive emails.
Implementing these strategies will not only keep your customers happy but also improve efficiency throughout your organization.
02. Create Easy And Effortless Customer Service
For instance, the design services necessarily have the element of creativity in their services. It’s what helps their clients stand out from the crowd.
Naturally so, they are expected to be creative in their website creation and optimization practices. However, don’t adopt impractical and way too unusual methods when it comes to customer service.
Except for a few website elements such as images or videos, customers like businesses to be simple and upfront, unless the industry demands otherwise. Include such strategies that make customer service easy and effortless and not chaotic and irritating.
Here Are Some Tips On What You Should Keep In Mind To Keep Customer Service Seamless And Accessible
- The customers should be able to find your organization with ease.
- Your website should be able to provide clarity to the customers about who you are and what you do as a business. They should be clear about how your services help them enhance their business.
- Provide them several communication channels to communicate your business. Also, let them know about the hours you are accessible.
- If there are some barriers or time delays in generating responses to complaints, questions, and feedback, be sure to state them clearly.
- Use jargon-free language to explain the key features of your company and how they can benefit your customers.
- Include a section of Frequently Asked Questions ( FAQs ) to help customers know what they should expect at every stage of their journey.
- Eliminate the potential problems beforehand so that you have a seamless experience for your customers.
Exceptional customer service directly impacts customer retention rates. The more effortless you make your customer service, the more likely you will have repeat customers. Incorporating services such as WhatsApp Customer Service can further elevate your customer service strategy. This will make you customer service more accessible and convenient.
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03. Create A Solid Navigation In Your Website
Your audience can judge your perspective to serve them just by browsing your website. There are a few giveaways, such as not putting effort into making the website design contemporary and easy to use can imply you won’t put any effort into helping them.
Basically, your website acts as a customer service representative, and your web design acts as the digital face of your business.
Therefore, create a web design that feels welcoming to your customers. One of the most vital components of a web development company and web design is the navigation of your website, which considerably defines the customer experience.
94% of customers have a positive attitude towards those websites that have a clear menu structure and the ability to navigate between pages quickly and efficiently.
Moreover, the attention span of visitors is short. They give a website no more than 6-8 seconds. If your website design and navigation fail to impress them, they will quickly switch to a competitor’s website.
Here’s What You Should Do To Keep The Website Navigation Easy And Effective
- Have mobile-responsive website navigation.
- Replace the drop-down menus with detailed pages.
- Include website search and make it frictionless.
- Make categories and subcategories by providing context.
- Add a mega footer.
If you treat website navigation seriously during website development, it will make your website seamless for the audience.
Apart from improving your customer experience that impacts customer service, it works well for SEO and keeps your website organized.
04. Travel The Extra Mile And Surprise The Users
Businesses are reluctant to go the extra mile to make the customer’s experience successful. However, if you’re doing only the bare minimum to keep your customers happy, why should they come back to your business?
When you fail to provide good customer service, your company may experience a decrease in customer retention rate. It affects your revenue and profitability as acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer.
Providing top-notch customer service is essential if you wish to maintain a long-term relationship with your customers. It makes them happy, and they become free marketers for you as they promote your business through word of mouth.
Whatever the industry, it doesn’t matter. Take the extra mile to help your customers as Aepnow does. One of the best ways to do so is to keep surprising customers. To make a buyer your customer for life, go out of your way and make them feel special so that they stick around.
You Can Adopt The Following Approaches
- Give your old and existing customers early access to certain services during launch.
- Send holiday, birthday, or anniversary cards to your customers.
- Repost customer pictures on your social media.
An element of surprise positively affects the customer, and they look forward to leveraging the services of your company.
05. Adopt A Human Approach
“Hi! How can we help you today?” – you must have been welcomed on a website by this pop-up message from an automated chatbot.
To be more efficient and quick, automated technology has built its place in every industry, and the companies are no stranger to it. In fact, a human approach to attending to your consumers’ complaints and issues is the best strategy for customer success.
However, no matter how fast the technologies advance, the most unique thing about us is our human approach towards the situation at hand. Hence, human interaction will always be the most valuable feature of customer service.
In a recent study, researchers found that 75% of customers prefer communicating with a live agent rather than a chatbot to get support.
When you provide excellent customer service through a live agent, there is a scope of display of human emotions such as sympathy or compassion. These feelings allow the customer to trust you more and build a loyal customer base.
Moreover, talking live to a customer executive makes them feel valued and understood. It improves your relationship with the customer and can increase customer satisfaction by up to 20%.
It’s also because AI-powered support can be confusing as it cannot go off-script. On the other hand, when a live agent deals with the customer, they can react to the concerns of a customer immediately and can determine a course of action to resolve the issue more quickly than a virtual channel can.
That being said, it’s no surprise that the human touch is a luxury in customer service. It is time-consuming and requires designated resources. If it’s difficult for you to do so, outsource customer support.
Gravy Solutions, a leadership development company, can provide the perfect recipe for the mix of humans and technology to ensure your customers feel like valued members of the family. With their help, you can improve customer satisfaction.
Conclusion
Crafting a great customer experience that your customers remember you by is no cakewalk. However, implementing smart customer service strategies is a step in the right direction. If pursued consistently, it can result in increased revenue, more profit, and enhanced growth of your business.
