6 tips to improve your customer service
Alexander Wijninga
| 4 min
The success of your business can depend on the success of your customer service team. We live in an increasingly customer-centric world, and the preference for online interaction has accelerated the growth of this mindset. By focusing on the success of your customer service team, you can ensure customer satisfaction is a priority. Satisfied customers mean more sales for your business, which is even more valuable than a new customer. How can you help your customer service team make the most impact? In this article we’ll offer you 6 tips to improve your customer service!
Tip 1: Get to really know your customer
A loyal customer spends on average 31% more than a new customer and is less expensive to retarget, as compared to acquiring a new customer (source). With that being the case, offering personal service to your loyal customers is highly recommended. By creating and maintaining customer profiles, you ensure customer #9562 is actually called Mrs. de Vries, lives in a small town in Limburg and previously got in touch with you via email to confirm her order was placed. A customer profile allows you to track and maintain information like a name, email address, conversation history or mailing address in a CRM system. This allows you to offer personalised service, allows you to take a customer-centric approach to service, and can help you improve the customer experience.
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Tip 2: Train your staff
You need to keep training your staff in order to optimise how you provide customer service. You may have a diverse team with varying degrees of expertise, but training offers the opportunity to standardise your approach in a meaningful way, and build or reinforce skills your team has. When a customer has an entirely different experience depending on the employee servicing him or her, that’s not an ideal experience for that customer. It’s important to research, relay and discuss trends in customer service. You can also discuss your team’s approach to a singular tone of voice that suits your company or your brand.
Customers have different expectations: one would love to chat all day, another wants the interaction to be short and to-the-point. Ultimately it’s important your customer leaves the interaction satisfied, and that the company tone of voice was clear. By exploring the customer interaction history, multiple employees can offer the customer the same level of service.
Tip 3: Don’t keep customers waiting
One of the biggest irritations during the modern-day consumer’s customer service experience is long hold times and waiting. You can typically find what you need online in a few clicks, and the expectations of service online are often the same. Automating customer contact can help meet these expectations, for example by leveraging a chatbot. A chatbot offers 24/7 availability, with the ability to help customers incredibly quickly. Strike while the iron is hot: it’s easy for your customer to look up your competitor online and buy from them. By automating frequently asked questions, your team has more time to spend on answering complex questions that are better answered by a human agent. Your customers get the answers they need, quickly - with a personal approach to service.
Tip 4: Use multi-channel customer contact
The ultimate user-friendly experience for a customer: ask a direct question on the channel they’re currently using. This might be live chat on your website, or on Facebook Messenger thanks to an ad they saw in their feed. A big part of your customer service being user-friendly is reachability. A multi-channel customer contact strategy ensures that customers don’t need to go out of their way to reach you, meaning less chance they abandon the reason they were reaching out.
Tip 5: Ask for feedback
Give your customer a way to tell you if they’re satisfied or dissatisfied, but make it super easy for them to tell you. Improving customer service is something you do with your customers, and only then you’ll understand how customers truly experienced your product or service.
There are a variety of ways to ask for feedback. This can be at the end of a conversation via emoticons, or sending a detailed customer feedback survey. A survey chatbot can also help automate the request for feedback. This data allows you to highlight your strong suits and help you make a step-by-step plan to improve the weaker points.
Tip 6: Make improvements based on data
Do you already have an idea of what the most important KPIs are for your customer service team’s performance? Yes? Awesome! Do you also track performance or statistics on these over time? Only this method will allow you to uncover trends and continuously optimise your team’s performance. Statistics allow you to see where you can adapt your service protocol or approach. Consider the following KPIs you may want to optimise:
How long is your average wait time?
A customer kept waiting is often an irritated customer. That’s why many companies choose to use a chatbot to handle first-line customer contact. The chatbot can answer frequently asked questions, or already gather information from the customer that’s needed for an upcoming interaction with a human service agent. This means your customers are helped quickly and efficiently. It’s also advisable to examine your resource allocation during peak volume times, and schedule your staff accordingly.
How long does the average conversation last?
When a conversation takes too long on average to complete, this could indicate several things. There might be repetition, for example, or asking for information takes too much time. When you uncover the pain points of the conversation, you can start to craft solutions. You could, for example, allow a chatbot to automatically request important information before the customer is transferred to a human agent. That saves precious time! This way you don’t only decrease the average conversation duration, but also enrich your CRM database and the customer’s profile.
Customer Service Software
Using customer service software allows you to centralise and automate your customer service. You can respond to customers quickly and personally. Watermelon offers an all-in-one customer service software. You can collaborate seamlessly with colleagues and build an artificially intelligent chatbot without programming. Want to learn more? Schedule a demo!
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