Tag: businesses

The Importance of Customer Feedback

Posted on by Supportbench

Try to nail your first one as you get started, then expand your customer experience across the rest of your customer base. Whether it’s using technology to enhance your customer experience or a discussion starter campaign, there is a whole slew of customer feedback to make sure your website is leading the way.

Here are six things you need to keep in mind when creating a delightful customer experience:

1. Customer service should extend beyond the website

The website should be a great starting point for creating a customer experience, but it shouldn’t be the end of it. You should always try to touch customers’ lives beyond the website. Take feedback online, offer multiple choice options in surveys or use a chatbot to speak with customers in more convenient ways.

Additionally, do keep in mind the customer’s journey from customer decision-making through customer service.

Want a better understanding of what people are thinking about your brand? Delve into customer feedback data and try to identify the phrases, feelings, impressions, and conversations your customers have with each other while they’re experiencing your brand.

2. Navigate the Customer Lifecycle Strategically

To create a memorable customer experience and ensure ongoing engagement, think through the customer lifecycle with a long-term view. Understand what your customer wants in the first moment and what they want in the future before you start your conversation.

Then serve them in a way that gives them the best chance to purchase or become a happy customer. Look at past success stories from your customers, determine which issues are most relevant to your business model, and design your customer journey to align with their feedback. For example, for a lending software business, if you wanted to acquire new customers, you would conduct in-depth interviews with potential borrowers, ask them about their financial goals, and measure their financial performance over time.

3. Create a repeatable sequence that sells

While there’s nothing wrong with giving people product ideas on a whim, offer a consistent and clear selling sequence that mimics this essential marketing principle. Not only is this incredibly valuable to your customers, but it also allows your content to generate unique user value, automatically aligning your content with what people find meaningful.

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and identify your unique selling point.

4. Market your content when your customers are talking

Everyone loves content, so all you have to do is offer up unique content to people who are thinking about it. The magic is creating relevant content for people at different stages of their customer journey by examining conversations that your brand is already having on social media.

You could compile a wealth of knowledge that you can spin into engaging content for your prospects, and use a simple algorithm to promote it to people waiting for more information.

5. Create a Conversation by Starting Conversations

Be proactive in your customer experience by creating a conversational tone so that you can both get more interaction with your customers and maintain control over your brand’s reputation. If your customers notice that you’re being proactive, they may start using their questions to convey their own thoughts or turn them into delightful content. Mention key topics of interest during a conversation with your customers, encourage questions, and respect their privacy by not sharing any confidential details.

6. Cultivate a customer community

Community members can boost a client’s visibility on social media, create anticipation around events, and even promote your brand to highly influential individuals. Those customer s can also participate in live Q&A sessions, recommend your products and services, and become advocates for your brand.

Over the past year, we’ve worked with our customers to create a number of experiences that are amazing, and that ultimately lead to happy customers. The following are our Customer Success success tips and insights from observing these experiences. Approach the customer in the most impactful way possible

The best customer experiences live up to the name, and then some. They’re emotional. They tackle problems in some creative and innovative ways. Whether it’s a simple thank you or going above and beyond to delight a customer, crafting messages that force a customer to open their eyes and give a soulful response, can lead to something extraordinary. We urge our customers to take this tip to heart, and to approach every customer the same.

When creating customer experiences that deeply delight customers, make them feel they have truly been listened to, and that you’ve understood their needs. Let your problems speak for themselves

The great thing about creating better customer experiences is that customers are happy to share them with others. When creating customer experiences that are easily resonant with customers, they are more likely to share these with their peers – customers beyond your customer base. This means a better customer experience can eventually lead to greater success. Our customers make excellent use of these experiences to increase their growth, including the post-incident customer experience; ensuring that customers are brought back to their desired action following a product transition; and helping to increase repeat customers. Deliver complex, repeatable customer experiences

Customer success managers often struggle to stay on top of their customer’s needs, because they need to try so many new things to drive the greatest impact. This is a natural part of starting a new company – and the importance of having that variety of customer experiences – but, it can still mean that your efforts can fall short.

A good customer success manager will be able to automate a customer’s interactions with your product by implementing and testing many different customer experiences. They should also be able to provide hundreds of new versions of the same customer experience that they’ve tested. For instance, you could use your customer’s complaint feed to provide a whole new, specific customer experience – without any of the work of attempting to generate new problems. Provide support for a longer period

Once customers are happy with your product, it’s important that they stay committed to your product. We must advocate for product adoption from the customer in the form of frequent self-support and training, and they are much more likely to stick with your product as long as you make every effort to help them along the way. It is also important that customers are able to seamlessly transition their support needs between solutions – particularly post-incident support. They should see no need to jump between products or training channels in order to obtain support, and even in the event that they need more support, we aim to educate them using Customer Success to ensure they are able to find the right person for the right support.

Continue to review, and reflect on these customer experiences as they happen

Most of the customer experiences you create with customers will never be perfect. We encourage our customers to take the time to constantly review, and evaluate their customer experiences. Regularly capture and document customer feedback, which should focus on both the process and the outcome. You should always encourage direct conversation with customers, so your Customer Success team can work through their conversations and provide any insights that may add to the customer experience. Once you have the feedback, use it to inform next steps – but make sure to focus on gathering and recognizing the insights that tell you what is working well for your customers, and what isn’t.

Our Customer Success team is designed to play this role, which is an important one.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support and get reliable customer feedback? Contact us today!

Customer Feedback is Critical to Customer Success

Posted on by Eric Klimuk

Does the word “customer success” even make you cringe? If you say it a lot, you know that even though it feels nice to praise your customers, the “thank you” can feel empty. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that what mattered the most to a customer is providing something of utmost value. In customer experience management, feedback matters.

We conducted research with the relevant sources, such as customers, analysts, and researchers; and designed a dozen customer surveys, with content that combined detailed questions, applications of observable behaviors, and social media in order to improve customer success.

These surveys, along with every piece of content created for customer communication, were then developed to reflect the following customer-centric metrics and insights:

Retention: Is the experience your customers have with your organization consistent with their feelings of a strong relationship?

Customer Satisfaction: How will your organization’s actions enhance your customer’s lifetime value, and will it be worth it for a business with only 100 customers to pay for the lifetime value of one customer?

Sales Opportunities: Do customers leave your business in large numbers because they encounter their best opportunities elsewhere?

Vision: Does your organization have enough leadership clarity, resources, and vision?

Innovation: Are your customers adopting new systems and processes when they realize you don’t offer this feature?

Data-Driven Approach: Is your organization committed to providing the best outcomes for customers with the right data, facts, analysis, and outcomes?

Connections: Do your organization’s customers feel heard, understood, and believed in?

Visionary Leaders: Are your organization’s leaders courageous enough to trust the customer and to think long-term about the future of your brand?

Providers: Do customers perceive your business’s providers as allies or competitors? If you’re new to the concept of customer experience management, or if you’re new to online customer engagement, we have some suggested ways to get started.

We also give you a glimpse of what we’re doing to help other businesses succeed, alongside our customer success centric approach for every page of a blog post.

What if you could create exceptional customer experiences with less effort?

Not possible? Better use existing customer data to offer customer actions that seem more convincing and have better chances of customer satisfaction.

We’ve all had those customer experiences – that annoying, ill-informed person who just won’t make a change despite the experience being horrendous. Or let’s say there are many issues and the issue with each person is different, so to say that there isn’t one right solution is to do a disservice to the customer and it’s customer success metric.

It’s a problem that all businesses face when trying to think of valuable customer insights that can enable better business decisions. Reality check

Research analyst IDC stated that the potential value of a customer experience is $117 for each dollar spent, and a new report by Forrester found that companies with an exceptional customer experience win 73% of their customers back, while losing only 8% of their customers.

They found that in order to create better customer experiences, businesses need to have customer data available to them from the very beginning. More than three quarters of companies surveyed said they had some kind of customer intelligence product and software to collect and analyze customer data and improve customer success.

Different businesses need different solutions in place to drive better customer experiences. Plus, they are not simple to implement and could be expensive, which most businesses simply do not have time for.

Fortunately, there is technology out there to help business understand their customers better.

Supportbench has a growing ecosystem of solutions that businesses can use to enhance their customer experiences, taking customer feedback even further. Supportbench works by building and connecting experiences with businesses across multiple channels and to various companies in real-time.

We are confident that if you are currently using a customer intelligence solution, you are missing out on the benefits of this technology in order to drive better customer experiences. Make the most of customer intelligence

The answer to creating exceptional customer experiences is giving customer insights a chance to shine. Whether that means identifying marketing shortcomings or finding more relevant ways to connect a customer with the right employee when a customer has specific issues.

We work with the top brands in the world to create great customer experiences, from 3M to Budget and these companies are setting great business goals by creating insights that can help them do just that.

Here are some of the top ways in which companies are using customer intelligence software:

When it comes to implementing new features, Supportbench creates customer success solutions that embrace the philosophy of moving fast and breaking things to understand how people are actually using the app. By helping a team understand what a new feature needs to do to ensure success, businesses are able to take steps to protect their customers and drive improved functionality. Intercom users are able to put customer insights into action through real-time action actions. Identifying and improving applications with customer insights can help increase work efficiency and reduce time spent on manual tasks. Transform a customer experience by continually learning from user feedback.

As a result, you can solve multiple critical business problems, making it possible to turn failures into successes and failures into discoveries.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support and build customer success? Contact us today!

How To Maintain a Healthy Customer Service Operation

Posted on by rpsstudios

Maintaining a Healthy Customer Service Operation Can Provide a Steady Stream of Revenue.

Customer service is a critical part of a business and many companies place it in the ranks alongside sales or other operations, but the size of a company’s call center has always been a determining factor for how customer support functions. A staff of about 20 people is great, and the number and size of your employee handling direct support can have a significant impact on the way you run the operation. That means that it’s vital to have employees and staff responsible for customer service at your help desk and ensure that every customer service operation is handled as well as possible.

Having a customer support team and a group of employees will allow for some much-needed unity and also give you quick access to the resources required to support customer demands. The benefits are many and customer service reps usually thrive when they build personal connections.

Due to improving marketing tactics, new businesses continue to increase customer acquisition but this is useless if new subscribers do not get the service they deserve from a company. Bigger calls mean more staff and that means more customer service hours per day.

You can increase the support of customer service reps with a strong call center that can assist customers with existing and new projects. Customer service reps are your future. When they are strong, you are more likely to get more support from them and should be able to give you loyal customers we get full service and support from the beginning of their service relationship with your company.

It can be challenging to set up a customer service team and decide how to structure the support team’s work schedule. Talk to the company manager and be sure that the key ratios are met and that the employee and customer service staff are working together to maximize the work hours for the team. Communication is key and your company manager must be fully aware of the needs of their staff.

When you are running long hours of help desk operation you should take care of your customer service reps and at the same time monitor that their time is spent interacting with the customer clients in person and that the customer service team is handling all of the customer’s needs.

How to Generate Revenue from Great Customer Service

In today’s competitive marketplace, many businesses are trying to generate revenue and are hungry for a customer service team that can assist in the revenue generation process. Rather than relying on external sources like advertising, businesses must place the same weight on retaining existing businesses as they do attract new businesses.

Different companies have different value propositions to engage in new business. Some businesses will engage in advertising and some will engage in sales strategy. Either way, it’s clear that many businesses spend a lot for new customer acquisition but don’t have the time and money needed to have a better service experience for their existing customers.

Finding customers to focus on is more important for businesses than other things because customer service is the foundation of a business and anything that can retain customers can be used to generate revenue.

You will notice that a lot of prospective customers are looking for something specific from their service team. A good customer service operation team should treat every customer with equal opportunity to use and enjoy their services. The customer support team should also make sure that customers have access to the best possible customer service experience for whatever activity or service that they want from your business.

Make sure that every employee uses each other’s behaviors to represent the best in themselves and the best in their department. When a service team wants to offer an answer, they always need to offer the best answer that the customer can get without compromising the professionalism of the whole team. The customer’s best interests as much as your bottom line should be the highest priority.

Customers who are happy share their experiences and could even vouch for your services. A great testimonial can work as well as any advertising that your marketing team can come up with.

How to Build Your Team

Not every person in your company should be labeled as a customer service rep. There should be specific people who reach out to customers and those who take action looking for solutions to their problems. But regardless if your teams work in different departments there should be great communication between all of them and the customer service team. Delivering customer satisfaction is a team approach and your results can drastically improve when there is harmony between all your departments.

Now, when you are choosing team members for your customer service department, you’ll want to make sure that these people should be able to follow the team script and should always keep in mind that they’re representative of everyone on the team. Define the roles of your company’s personnel because customers appreciate it when they can easily identify the people that are able to help them with their inquiries and problems.

When your business start scaling, stop thinking that your business is a one-man show. You can’t do everything. However, you can start building a team that can offer you support and face customer problems in a timely manner. You can build this kind of team slowly, beginning with one person if that’s all you can afford at first, then with the help of that person build a system that would make it easier for other customer service reps that will come to your aid later.

As someone who knows the ins and outs of your business, you should be able to figure out the best type of individuals to work with on your customer service team. Look for people with experience or those who are willing to be trained with the kind of customer service that you expect to keep your customers happy and satisfied.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

Mastering your customer’s journey

Posted on by rpsstudios

When you’re just getting started building a business, customer service is often the first and smallest thing you need to do. You need to understand how your customers receive their messages and what works best for your businesses and solutions. So, before diving headfirst into customer service, let’s take a moment to understand the different aspects of your customer’s journey, what you should be doing, and what not to do in this space.

What’s the secret to great customer service?

To build customer service into a strong foundation, you need to understand it in a certain way, and then act on the results of those insights. At Support Bench, we believe that great customer service means great customer insights.

While many CMOs may not know this, customer insight starts with a customer analytics study. That customer analytics study should offer valuable insights, including your most valuable customers. That said, very little of your customer’s data is out there.

Making sense of customer data

At a basic level, customer service insights are pretty easy. For example, if your company is looking to collect and analyze data from a single channel, a customer portal can play a role in getting you started. For small or relatively new businesses, listening to how customers interact with your product and services can provide valuable insight.

Another step is building good content around customers — whether it’s on their website, social media, email, or other channels. If you have a solid content strategy that focuses on what the different channels communicate, and the types of content that are most effective for them, it’s possible that you can access customer information to gain insights into your content’s impact.

Customers will tell you what they want

As part of your customer relationship management (CRM) strategy, you want to provide everything your customers want: more information, more options, and more things to do. So, the biggest piece of the puzzle is determining what they need and providing it to them.

A great example of this is by analyzing the overall brand experience. When customers download your app or website, they usually want to know when it’s a good time to come back, what “power metrics” they should track, and how to access content that aligns with their needs.

The customer experience is a highly personal one — and you shouldn’t ignore that message. Don’t make your customer feel like they’re yelling at you, or like you’re directing them to bad information.

Choose the right channel

One of the best ways to create a perfect customer experience is to choose the correct channel. When you choose the right channel to serve customers, you create a very important understanding of who they are and what part of your customer’s journey your customers are. If they’re not in your database, you’re giving them a very incomplete picture of what type of customer they are. The right channel allows you to pinpoint how your customers are doing, and what, if anything, could help them do better.

The right channel is the one that help them do more. When your channel offers something that helps them do something, it’s likely that this will be among the things that lead to positive outcomes for them. For example, if you provide a tool that helps an employee better use their time, that should be something you implement in your channel. That means you make a strong connection with the information on your channel, based on what you’ve gathered.

Utilize the tools you already have

If your brand is not exactly known for customer service, even the most basic resource can be used to grow the number of your customers you get. This means you make an effort to understand your existing customer’s profile and create a relationship with them, or better yet, find out what helps them do better.

As part of your marketing automation (MaaS) platform, you can share analytics about all your customers on the platform. Make sure they’re aware of these, too. You can then learn more about them, and your customer’s journey and as a result, provide them with useful insights into what can improve their customer experience.

Don’t waste time on service matters

Conventional customer service will be extremely frustrating. When you need to do something, you’ll find your customer waiting for someone to help you, and they’ll either take a deep breath or will get very frustrated. At Support Bench, we’ve all experienced poor customer service experience in our own lifetimes. As the owner of a successful business, there’s something you should never do. It’s never simple to solve a customer’s problem. Good customer service doesn’t just happen automatically. It’s always worth the time.

Support Bench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!