/ How customer service leads to higher customer satisfaction
Alexander Wijninga
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4 min
To deliver good customer service it is important that you know exactly what your company stands for, and how you let that show through in customer contact. Satisfied customers keep coming back and advertise positively for your product or services. Read everything about customer service in this article, and how you improve it for your company.
Customer service, also known as customer service or customer support, is the organ in a company that focuses on answering customers' questions and complaints. This team is the company's calling card, because they often serve as the first point of contact for the customer. For webshops in particular this is often the only form of customer contact.
What does customer service involve exactly? Customer service is present in many different ways. Companies are often reachable through their website, but also by telephone or via social media. The possibilities of what customers can ask are endless. Think of questions about how a particular product works through to questions about deliveries. It is therefore important that customer service has a lot of knowledge about the company and its services, in order to give the best possible answers.
There are many different kinds of company, which means there are many different kinds of customer service too. You make the biggest distinction by looking at where the company is located. When a company is online only, customer contact will be looked at differently than when the focus is on a physical shop.
When your company is mainly offline, a different kind of customer service takes place. In this case a large share of customer contact is face to face. A customer comes into the shop to exchange a product or submit a complaint, and it is therefore important that your staff know how to handle different situations. It is also important that you are easy to find online and that you are always reachable via a telephone number or (live) chat.
If your company is online only, you touch on an entirely different part of customer service. It is then no longer only about being reachable, but above all about being very broadly reachable. You have no physical point of contact and it is therefore of great importance that the customer chooses for themselves which platform they approach you from. To make use of as many different channels as possible, you bundle all your inboxes on a single platform. That way you answer everything easily.
When you use physical shops and a webshop, the same applies: train your staff in the shops well and make sure you are broadly reachable online. Your brand personality and brand experience run through everywhere, so make sure you draw a single line in your company's image. It would be a shame if one detracted from the quality of the other. For example: someone buys a beautiful dress in the shop and is very satisfied with the service. She then buys a product online and has a question about the size, but at customer service the member of staff rushes through the conversation. This detracts from the picture she had of the company beforehand. Make sure, therefore, that you carry the same norms and values through everywhere. By working with your team from a single piece of multichannel software you have more grip on maintaining the right service.
The number one irritation among customers at the moment is having to wait a long time for customer service. Of all the everyday questions you have, you find the answer on Google within 1 minute; that is now the standard. When a customer has to wait a very long time for customer service, patience therefore runs out very quickly. You solve this problem by bringing in a chatbot. This removes the waiting time at a stroke.
When the consumer thinks of your brand, a strong brand feeling should come up. What this brand feeling involves is largely for you to determine. Work out what your company stands for, what you want to radiate and what you want people to remember about you. You use these aspects when setting up your customer service and this has to be the same on all channels. Make sure you answer all your channels from a single platform, in order to make this achievable.
When your customer service runs well and you have a lot of conversations, you obtain data from those conversations. Look at how many conversations were held, for example, how long those conversations lasted and what the most common subjects were. On the basis of this you make improvements. When there are many questions about a particular subject, you know that there is uncertainty here and you tackle it.
Customer service software helps you set up your customer service. This happens by means of several features, which differ for every company. Watermelon combines these features. Thanks to Watermelon's revolutionary conversation platform you hold conversations with your customers anywhere, any time. You easily integrate a chatbot that quickly takes over 80% of the conversations and answer the remaining questions from your laptop or phone. You get access to extensive statistics and see exactly what the bottlenecks within your company are. You easily pick up conversations and forward them to colleagues. That way you improve your customer service in no time. Curious about the platform? Try it yourself and create a free account.
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