/ Set your organisation apart with brilliant customer service
Alexander Wijninga
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5 min
The Netherlands currently has more than 51,500 online shops - and that is without counting foreign webshops such as Ali Baba. You can imagine that it is sometimes hard for consumers to see the wood for the trees. How do you set yourself apart from your competition? A good way of doing this is by offering better customer service than they do. Good customer service leads to high customer satisfaction and high customer loyalty. How do you set your service apart from the competition's? You can read it in this article.
The basis of customer service is being there for consumers. When they run into something, you are there to lend a helping hand. The most used channels for offering service are email and telephone contact: 35% of Dutch people usually have telephone contact with customer service and 32% send an email. Customer contact is often only possible from nine in the morning to five in the afternoon. The customer in 2020 expects more than this, though: when they look at your website in the evening, they want to be able to ask questions too. By being there for your customers 24 hours a day you do meet that expectation and go further than your competition.
To make your customer service surpass the competition's, you can put more focus on the importance of customer-friendliness and on the quality of your customer service. Respond to new innovations and make sure nobody is easier to reach than you! When you pay attention to the following points, you get everything out of your customer service:
Go further than availability on email and telephone alone and embrace all the popular social media channels as customer service opportunities. To be able to keep an overview, it is advisable to bundle these channels on a single platform. That way you see all conversations from email, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram come in chronologically, and you easily pick them up one by one. Did you know that 9.3 million people in the Netherlands use WhatsApp? You can imagine it can work out very favourably if you are reachable there with your webshop too!
For most companies, customer service is reachable from nine to five. If you have a question after that, you have to wait until the next morning. You eliminate this annoying situation by bringing in a chatbot. You teach a chatbot exactly what it should say and determine the direction of the conversation. The chatbot catches all first-line customer contact and simple questions are answered in a flash. You can also set a chatbot up so that it can see order statuses. Should a customer wonder when his or her parcel will arrive, the chatbot can look the answer up at lightning speed and pass it on. Does the chatbot get stuck on a more complex question? Then a member of staff easily takes the conversation over. Should a competitor not be able to offer the right answers straight away, customers will be more inclined to buy a product from you.
When a customer approaches your customer service, it is sensible to stay in contact from that moment on. Support a customer through the purchasing process by answering all their questions, and offer suggestions for buying particular products or services. When you assist your customer well, the chance that your product actually gets sold is greater.
We understand that your customer service team will not be thrilled by the idea of assisting every customer with every small purchase. Fortunately a chatbot can take this over from you; that way you save time and money, without detracting from the quality of your customer service. A chatbot requests contact details from the customer straight away, which means you move smoothly on to aftersales. With an aftersales strategy a customer ends up in an email funnel, where all the new features of your company can be shared. Think of newsletters, for example, or promotions. By doing this, customers stay informed about your company, you stay on top of mind, and they will return to your webshop sooner.
This also lets you maintain proactive contact. A good example of a company applying this strategy is KLM. They send the tickets by means of a chatbot when they know your Facebook Messenger account. The bot then asks straight away whether you have any more questions, which means you can ask your questions quickly and easily.
Maintaining personal contact is extremely important. Ask return questions, notice details and call someone by their first name. When you call someone by their first name, for example, you create a familiar feeling, which means people feel at ease more quickly. When you have contact with a customer yourself this is quickly achieved, but how do you do this with a chatbot? Connect your chatbot to your CRM system and have your bot request a customer's name automatically. That way the chatbot builds a 360-degree customer profile bit by bit. This lets you always see the conversation history with your customer. When a customer then returns to your webshop, the chatbot recognises this person and links them back to the previous conversation. That way you offer a hyper-personal service, without having to do anything yourself. A win-win situation for the customer and for the company.
Keep a close eye on the trends in the field of customer service and respond to them as fast as possible. That way you are quickly a step ahead of your competition. To stay well informed at all times, consult Google at least once a month and hold a monthly meeting with your staff to look at which innovations are worth implementing.
When you invest in your customer service you get a lot back for it. You create more loyal customers and raise your turnover, which means you will quickly see your company grow.
The money you spend on customer service you earn back many times over when regular customers come out of it. And that really does happen: 62% of B2B customers and 42% of B2C customers say they come back to a company after a good experience with customer service. Investing in your customer service certainly bears fruit.
With a customer-centric approach and more loyal customers, your turnover rises. Regular customers spend considerably more than new customers, which makes them indispensable to your company. Research shows that regular customers spend 67% more than new ones. Even when you can call only 20% of all your customers a ‘regular customer’, this percentage already accounts for around 80% of your turnover.
Then invest in ease of use and innovation. Make sure you use a clear overview for your customer service. Bundle all your customer contact and increase your availability by deploying a chatbot. When you use Watermelon you do this and you easily work together with your colleagues. Forward conversations to the right team at the push of a button and even personalise automated conversations by connecting your CRM system to the chatbot platform. Curious? Try it yourself and create a free account.
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