/ Customer service: all the tips you need to know
Alexander Wijninga
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5 min
Sales and customer service are closely linked, which is why customer service staff often receive training beforehand. This also shows the importance of the department: good customer service leads to a higher conversion rate. Even so, it is not as easy as it looks and there are many different aspects of service. Read everything about customer service and the possible improvements to it in this article:
What is customer service, actually? Customer service is the part of your organisation that offers services and support to existing customers and potential customers. By getting in touch with customer service you get an answer to your questions or find room to pass on your complaints. A company's customer service is often to be found on several channels, for example on Facebook, on their website or by telephone.
Customer service is of great importance because it largely influences customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is very important, because recruiting new customers is a good deal pricier than retaining existing ones. Customer loyalty also produces word-of-mouth advertising, which influences other people positively. That customer service matters is certainly reflected in the figures, regardless of whether the experience was positive or negative (Teamadis, 2020):
42% of consumers buy a product more often after a good experience with customer service.
95% of people share a bad experience with customer service with others offline or online.
88% of consumers say that product reviews strongly influence their buying behaviour.
Good customer service is customer service where everyone comes out of a conversation better than they went into it. This can happen in various ways. It may be that you approach customer service because you have a question. One way of coming out of this conversation better is that your question is answered well. It may also be that you have a complaint you would like to raise. It is then important that the customer service agent listens well and thinks along with you. A customer comes out of this conversation better either because the problem has been solved or because they have been listened to properly and you have the feeling that you have been taken seriously.
Would you like to know how you can improve your customer service? The way to set your customer service up optimally is by applying the following tips:
It is important that you are always there for your customers, but at the same time this is also very difficult. It is hard to keep a team running 24/7, which is why using a chatbot is very enriching. With a chatbot you are no longer tied to the human needs of staff, but you do stay reachable at all times. A chatbot can soon hold up to 80% of all conversations from beginning to end. Only for the more complex questions does the customer then have to wait for a member of staff. Through this digitalisation you remove a lot of waiting time and with it the customer's irritation.
Where it was once enough to be reachable by telephone alone, that is no longer the case. Being reachable via social media customer service is very important. 42% of consumers say they would rather clean the toilet than pick up the phone to call customer service. People are used to fast service. If they run into something, they want a fast and adequate answer. Make sure you have this properly arranged at the back end too with the right multichannel software. This lets you avoid mounting costs through inefficient work.
Make sure you never (noticeably) give a customer the feeling that you doubt them, but always put the customer at the centre. Every problem and every complaint matters. Always keep your patience and try to find a good solution to the problem. When you use a chatbot you only answer the more complex questions, which makes it easier to keep your focus.
It is human for your first reflex to be defensive when someone accuses you of something. That is not a problem, but try to recognise it. When someone approaches customer service angry or irritated, try to look through that and look at where the problem really lies. When a mistake has been made by your company, try not to find an excuse for it, but admit your mistake. It is important that you discuss this with your staff and that everyone responds in the same way in such a situation. Do you only offer apologies, for example, or do you also offer compensation?
If you pay a lot of attention to your customer service you naturally also want to know whether it is bearing fruit. These are the two simplest ways of doing that:
When you use live chats this is a good opportunity to ask for feedback straight away. When you close a conversation you choose to implement a quick feedback moment. This can be done by asking the question “how did you experience this service?” and letting the customer respond with buttons. You can also ask two questions in which you measure expertise and speed. You set this up on the basis of what you want more feedback about.
A RATER survey is very well known and measures five important elements of service quality. It is a survey in which, by means of targeted questions, you measure the following:
Reliability: the extent to which the promised service is delivered.
Assurance: the expertise of staff and the way in which they create confidence.
Tangibility: what the outside of the company looks like; think of the website, the building or the employees themselves.
Empathy: the empathy and solution-focus of the staff.
Responsiveness: how quickly employees offer service and the extent to which they are willing to offer fast service.
Integrate these tips seamlessly with Watermelon's support software. Watermelon offers an innovative platform in which several possibilities come together. You build smart chatbots without programming knowledge, which lets you automate a large part of your customer service. You also easily connect different channels to the platform, which gives you one big inbox and means you no longer have to switch between social media channels. Then easily forward these questions to your colleagues or pick them up yourself. Would you like to see this for yourself? Try it yourself and create a free account!
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