Tag: support

5 Steps to Improve Customer Support

Posted on by Supportbench

Every business seeks to improve customer support for customers who are the best and most valuable to the brand.

And every business has a second set of customers who are the best and most loyal to the brand but who might also be a bit less valuable.

Your best way to capture and retain both sets of customers is to invest and improve customer support.

Customer support works for both types of customers, but there’s one thing that separates them: A great customer service culture. And it can go a long way toward improving your bottom line.

You can have a killer customer support culture in your company without getting fancy. If you look at your customer support data from the analytics side of things, you’ll see there are a lot of actionable skills and behaviors that your team has that could be scaled up.

But we often hear business owners say, “I can’t afford to train my customer support team” – which is often the underlying belief of most small business owners.

The cost to improve customer support and training a remote team is often very low, but having a basic training program built into the organization from the beginning is the only true path to customer support success.

When new customers come through the door, it can take an extra minute for a support representative to kind of nurture them into a loyalty brand advocate. So, you don’t want to set up a support team that is ignorant of products and services and can’t then reinforce a user-friendly brand experience.

Instead, look at the bulk of your inbound communication as a customer onboarding process. You’re going to want to prepare and train your people to come to your consumers as experts in your brand and in your products and services – but a great customer service culture starts well before those people become members of your team.

Every support representative brings some kind of unique attributes that make them uniquely suited to help your customers. And with real customer experience leadership the organization can scale insights up into employee behaviors, communication, knowledge management and improve customer support.

A unified customer support framework can dramatically increase both customer success and revenue growth. You don’t have to hire people at every individual level for the support organization to be successful.

Luckily for you, there are platforms like Supportbench to help you grow your brand and scale your team in a way that gets results. Even “shy” teams can be refactored to deliver a better experience – and then scale up as needed. Now is the perfect time to get training right.

A lot of high-growth companies are growing their customer support teams, but they’re also ramping up their engagement platforms to support a growing customer experience.

Your business can succeed while never losing its long-term focus on customer satisfaction and value to your customers.

The road to a customer-centric company begins by better understanding the interests and values of your customers and making every interaction with them feel more relevant. Following an agile, iterative approach to customer support can help you change how and where you support your customers to support that effort.

Here are five tips to foster a winning customer service culture:

1. Listen to your customers

Listen for and actively invite feedback from your customers to understand what’s important to them and uncover opportunities to improve how you provide service. Have your customer success team play active listening to customers as you work with them to understand the performance of your products and services, identify and solve recurring challenges that may be preventing customers from reaching their goals, and better predict the next level of conversations and service visits.

2. Understand the business and your internal infrastructure

Employees, product, and business teams all have different operating requirements and goals. People are passionate about their products and services; sales teams are very motivated to increase bookings.

Sellers are incentivized to make a sale and keep their commission as an indication of product success. There are many factors that come into play that affect your service team’s success that vary from the needs of your product management team to employees’ affinity for technology and customer success resources.

Before you can help your customers, you need to first build up your customer support team to adapt to the needs of your organizations.

3. Don’t be too rigid

There are many good reasons you want to offer the highest level of customer support you can, but you need to implement a plan that works in all departments. Start by hiring for who you want to be.

When you have your ideal customer, go for it!

But not all companies want to attract customers that way. Help as many as you can, but remember that your customer success team isn’t set up for fixing problems.

Be flexible and have a plan that uses a consultative, “we’ll explain your problem to you” approach instead of a one-way mode where they’re filling in every single need the customer has with solutions.

4. Use metrics to guide your conversations

You’ll quickly discover that there are many metrics to keep in mind when working with your customer support team. Talk to your customer success team about what metrics matter most for them so they can improve customer support.

Develop a communication plan to identify bottlenecks that could limit speed of resolution. Build those metrics into your employee performance and evaluation plans to improve customer support.

5. Focus on quality

The easiest way to take a task off your plate is to eliminate it completely. If there’s something that you’re spending your time on that isn’t worth it or could be done quicker, start by reducing the frequency of that conversation. Make a plan to track all feedback and help sell solutions instead of solve every customer ’s issue.

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!

How to take care of your customer from start to finish

Posted on by rpsstudios

Find out more about how you can take care of your customers and become a top industry player by presenting your innovation in a compelling way.

We’ve compiled tips on how to plan the best customer experiences for your organization. There are a lot of different ways to create excellent customer experiences.

But here’s what we’ve found is the best method:

Incorporate ‘conversation-centric’ thinking into your product design

Know the questions that your customer will be asking and answer them. Understand the customer’s needs by focusing on those core needs before thinking about any elements of the experience.

Conduct digital surveys

One of our customers used Amazon Kiva robots to collect customer preferences. Our customers’ service, which develops video conferencing systems, utilized Kiva’s speech recognition technology to create computer-generated responses. These responses were then used to build customized consumer surveys.

Use data analysis and intelligence

Data-driven behavior change should start with intuitive, sustainable features. Support teams evaluate which features are attracting and retaining customers in real time and create customized product features based on customer reactions and take care of your customer.

Cast your net wide

Create lists of target audiences and use the insights to create rich and engaging content. Don’t just focus on your own market — think about other customers, market segments and existing media use.

Use content that encourages conversation

Intentional content facilitates the ‘ask-ask-ask’ exchange. Start early with survey questions. Your team need to understand the intent of the user and continually test interactive content to make it more effective.

Keep it simple

Make it quick and simple for customers to take advantage of your service or product. Be sure that the interaction is straightforward and use easy-to-understand customer journeys to guide you through your customer journey mapping process and take care of your customer.

Set clear objectives

Define clear customer outcomes and measure results. Focus on the needs of the customer and draw from this information.

Make it happen

Promote your service and product and actively encourage the customer’s participation. Set a frequency of contact to enable your team to get to know the customer more and make them feel valued and valued for their ongoing engagement.

Make it that way

Don’t anticipate customer objections. Don’t try to be perfect all the time — learn from your experiences and make adjustments as you go. Also, be mindful of attrition rates — don’t get pushed to focus on this too much.

Invest in ideas

If you use a client facing technology, consider your team’s ideas. Creative projects are a great way to change your attitude to ideas — and maybe add to them.

Build a sustained value proposition

When delivering results you need to persuade your customers why you are worth the price. With the internet, everyone can shout over your deliverables. Spend time to get to know your customers, listen to their needs, and use this to your advantage. Set a service expectation to properly take care of your customer.

Provide a service expectation based on your customer’s relationship with the company — how do you measure this? How do you make sure that you are delivering this consistent experience day in day out?

Look at complex issues

Find out what ‘the way things were’ looks like, especially in complicated scenarios such as demographic data, market segmentation, geography and technology trends. What are the various ways to deliver better business outcomes if you can bring complexity to the table? Then set steps that build the structures for this.

Be innovative

Look to the latest technologies to create better customer experiences.  Undoubtedly, you’ve learned something during your eight years building your platform. So you know the tricks for delighting your customers.

But what about the dirty work? When you talk to your customers about how they think your service should work for them, how do you know which stories and techniques really matter? When you catch customers doing great things, you know that there’s still plenty you can do to empower them to care for your users.

Take a step back and answer these five questions to understand what’s working for your customers:

1. How can my customers use my service to help them achieve their goals?

What are your customers’ top priorities? Know which features they’re using to achieve their goals. Try out Supportbench’s platform to find out which features are particularly useful to your customers. Think about the features you could add.

2. What differentiates my customer from the competition?

We have our customer personas in place, but you still need to examine how your customers behave. Study successful companies and think of the customer as a whole – which features fit most naturally to the culture of your company?

3. What is success like for my customer ?

This is probably the most important question.

Take a step back and think about what success looks like for each member of your company – it might be a goal or objective, or simply making someone’s lives easier on a day to day basis.

4. What is success for me?

Remember to build this question into your plans – make sure you can measure your own success, otherwise you may feel like you aren’t making progress towards your goal.

5. How do I have the power to influence my customers?

This question is about empowering yourself and seeing who you can influence. Think about how can you bring additional value or delight to your customers experience.

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 take care of your customer? Contact us today!

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!

7 Steps to Drive Real Customer Support Improvement

Posted on by Eric Klimuk

Many businesses have the same goals: to drive real trust and customer support improvement to their bottom line. However, restoring trust, as well as increasing the revenue stream, for some businesses seems impossible.

In such cases, customer service or customer support improvement can be the solution. Without customer service, consumers will search online, calling, emailing, (after all these tools are very expensive) or even post on social media. A simple Google search for customer service help or case studies can lead you to hundreds of examples for customer support improvement.

We have examined thousands of case studies and hundreds of case studies that both gave an overall assessment of customer service initiatives as well as how to verify and audit the actual data, as well as how to differentiate it. The key takeaways for managers are:

1. Customer service takes years to build trust with customers

A company provides outstanding service but two out of three customers never know about it. This may be the reason why only 37% of US businesses are serving their customers as they should. As you can imagine, this can have a very significant impact on your bottom line as 70% of customers form their opinions about you based on customer service.

In fact, 90% of consumers will simply stop buying from you if you don’t fix your service issues. The customer journey begins with a business statement describing what your organization does. This is vital because, in the post-internet age, your competitors have so much more control over customer perception and opinions.

2. It’s not a minor issue

Your customers need your help to validate their opinions because trust is a priceless asset. Without this, your real value proposition becomes blurred as to who are really accountable for your customers’ experience and therefore how much they’re going to take your word for it.

In the absence of security for your data, your competitors become better at collecting information than you. This gives them a competitive vantage over you and can present the most severe problem to the rest of the field as well.

3. Customer service dominates the top five business top trends for 2020

Over 80% of businesses which have successful customer service overall will increase their market share.

Today’s automation plays a major role in customer service and this makes up for most of the mistakes, as well as in the inability to build an excellent customer service culture or drive customer support improvement.

Despite it, there are certain lessons companies can take away by looking at both case studies and performance metrics in finance, healthcare, insurance, government, etc. They can easily check if their strategies are working out in practice and simply using additional variables like agents’ response time, how they’re training them, the amount of advertising dollars they’re spending on customer service (both online and offline) etc. can also provide valuable insights into the real performance of customer service.

4. Conduct an audit of the customer data

Let’s say you own a software company. Your next step is to visit the website of your top competitors and see what they can tell you about your customers. Additionally, using sites like G2.com that provide aggregated reviews from customers of rival products can show what customers are finding to be valuable and where there may be potential missteps. Using this data, you can get access to valuable customer data points of competitors that you may use to improve your customer support, positioning, and also for better understanding of market dynamics.

Furthermore, if you’re already a leer in customer service, we recommend making sure you make a point of having several performance audits and reviews along the way. Having multiple auditing sessions along the line might have a huge impact on your bottom line and this certainly helps you save yourself time, energy and money on the process.

5. Know how to answer every question

Back to customer support solutions, the most important aspect of a successful customer support improvement is being able to answer every question. In order to avoid questions, the rest of your communication should be about what you can do to fix it and how you’re going to do it.

In many cases, your customers prefer email and you try to answer some questions manually, like who can they call, how, what kind of questions or how they should respond to some specific questions.

By knowing and working through the questions and answers, you can then start compiling and building an internal knowledge base to help support your team. Furthermore, you can even use this to build a public facing self-service knowledge base that allows your customers to find the answers before contacting you, offloading common questions from your customer support team.

The key is to make sure that you also have a customer support solution such as Supportbench that will allow you to respond instantly and actually even facilitate some better answers.

6. Identify the key factors on customer satisfaction

The ability to enhance your customers’ health score is what’s defined as your company’s ability to live up to your customers’ expectation for what your company is best known to do. There are many different issues, like tracking your customers after getting an order, direct communication and change, resolving issues, or providing more coverage in the event of a claim. That’s why it’s important to look at a customer’s journey from the beginning and measure how you can help your customers. As part of doing so, it’s crucial to understand their pain points and understand what you can do to identify problems, tackle questions, and adjust your service.

Additionally, it is vital to view potential customer service challenges in perspective of your company and get your KPIs on a weekly basis. And before you can start looking at customer satisfaction, you have to see these issues as a business opportunity. So the first step of identifying problems is taking an eye-opening look at your customer satisfaction overall.

Business logic is at the root of every problem, and that’s how you first get to know your customers. It’s important to know what their feedback is and how you could be improving the way you engage with them. Without taking those first steps, you might fail to see the big picture and miss a great idea of how to take action.

Most industries today would be shocked by the fact that attention to customer retention is incredibly poor. According to the Customer Service World, more than 55% of Americans were unsatisfied with their customer experience in 2017.

And the fact that US customers use 27 customer service agencies because they aren’t getting the help they need has also skyrocketed. That’s why it’s vital to prioritize fixing those issues. What started as a mistake can really negatively impact the entire customer experience. It’s important to develop systems that match each and every employee’s needs so that you are doing everything possible to strengthen the relationship between you and your customers and drive customer support improvement

7. Get real on leading change

When it comes to effective customer service, leadership skills are a powerful part of it. Every time there is an issue with your business, it’s the responsibility of the business leadership to lead. You need to help shape the organization and help redefine the way customers interact with your company. Without change, you will continue to miss opportunities to build on your customer’s experience.

Customer satisfaction is the core of every relationship and for many consumers, that’s the number one touch point with your company. And in fact, even though those are two words that most companies don’t use in their daily messaging, people do use them.

Influencers are great to engage with your audience and you want to make sure they see value in your company. You must be there when customers want you to be there. And if you aren’t there, well that doesn’t translate to customer retention. It also means that you aren’t helping your customers get the service they need. They may be experiencing problems, but without knowing what you are doing, your next steps in communication may not lead anywhere good.

Once you know that 80% of all social media users dislike passive interaction and 85% of them are looking for engagement, you should be doing everything you can to satisfy that need. That is why being active with social media is crucial to customer satisfaction in 2020.

In some ways, a basic and simple guide to getting on social media that could improve your business. If you want to be there when people want you to be there, then you need to be there by listening to your customers and acting accordingly.

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!

How to build a customer-service culture in your company

Posted on by Eric Klimuk

Hiring a customer-service manager is the first step in bringing customer-service culture practices in your organization up to snuff.

But you don’t have to go through the trouble of hiring a consultant to make it happen; you can institute successful customer-service practices in your company by investing in everything from cultural training to customer service development. And to make sure you’re focused on developing the team, take the following steps to ensure you have a strong customer-service culture in your organization:

1. Work with an Experienced Customer-Service Trainer

Having an internal member of your team sit down and teach people at their pace is like watching paint dry: it takes time to get everyone on the same page. That’s why it makes sense to find a customer-service expert who can help companies across the country teach and train employees.

If your company doesn’t have one available, go to the experts at Glassdoor Workforce Solutions for the full list of best customer-service consultants for a customer-service culture.

2. Audit The Employees

If you want to build a winning customer-service culture in your company, you need to uncover where they’re finding themselves stumbling down the road and how can you help them realize success.

If you can’t find a way to upgrade their learning, look into how you can improve their job role or employee compensation package. This will give you a better idea of how to get them where they want to go.

If you have a company that’s growing and needs more new hires, find a way to attract and engage this new talent to your company. This can either mean investing more in their package or investing in training them on their chosen paths so that they can succeed.

3. Deliver on your Company Values

While it’s encouraging to see a company working on the right values, it’s even more important that a company follow through on them. This means having policies in place that ensure that the team understands and upholds the company’s values.

At the end of the day, your employees aren’t interested in joining your company just because you have policies that say so. They’re looking for a company that believes in them. For example, a company that won’t charge its employees fees for programs and training that would make the employee more productive and the company more money is more than likely going to keep them happy within your customer-service culture

4. Stay Alert And Proactive

Regardless of what you’re doing, or how you’re doing it, if you’re not doing what you need to do, you can’t expect your team to fall in line. Instead, you’re going to need to be constantly active in your company.

For example, look into how you can train your employees and how your company can attract new talent to get better at what it does. Then, stay on top of it, stay aware, and always be proactive.

If you were able to outline all of the steps mentioned above in this guide, you’ll have a strong foundation in place to meet all of your company’s needs.

4. Delivering On Service To The Benefits Of A Great Brand

Your best customers are a reflection of the brand that you’re representing. If your organization isn’t known for communicating with its customers, and if you’re not known for its exceptional customer service, then your business will die. Because today, quality Customer Service is an expectation, not a nice to have.

Fortunately, there are things you can do to build a great brand. Namely, you can work on building a strong reputation of customer service.

If you’re already known for outstanding customer service, then this will make you a well-respected leader in your field. Then, with a solid reputation, you’ll be able to maintain it. Therefore, as they say, the more customers you have, the more profitable you’ll be.

But that’s not the only thing you can do to build a great brand. In fact, it’s more important than that. If you have a strong brand, you should be able to implement it in every aspect of your business.

5. Expand The Road Map For Your Brand

Another way that you can build a great brand is to look at where your brand is and where it could be going.

For example, a great brand is recognized, people will remember it, and what brand owners want their business to be known for is easily identifiable. However, if you haven’t been the best customer service leader in your organization, your competitors will be—and this will lead to lost business and losses of money.

Therefore, your best bet is to make all of your social media, press, and advertising platforms more visible to everyone. This will expose your brand to the widest audience possible, and when people know about your brand, they’ll be more likely to share it.

This will also allow you to create a strategy that will allow your brand to become a well-known brand: Maybe they’ll want to know the competition is coming after them. Or maybe they’ll notice that you’re a customer-centric brand instead of a brand that doesn’t care about their customers.

The goal of this exercise is to give you an overview of where your brand is, as well as where it could be going.

No matter how you look at it, people judge companies by how well they treat their customers. If you don’t make an effort to go out of your way to do that, then your business will fail. Everyone will not only know that you don’t care about your customers, but that you consider it beneath you to even exist there.

But it’s not always about treating your customers well. The other key to building a winning customer service culture is a culture of integrity. This kind of attitude will set your brand apart from the rest of the crowd.

But isn’t it also all about keeping the fans happy? Sure, but loyalty doesn’t just happen. You need to keep them happy so that they come back time and time again to do business with you. And this is where an active, competitive customer service culture comes in. If you don’t really care about people, then you’ll lose customers – and you’ll lose money.

If you’re serious about establishing a winning customer service culture, you need to make sure that every department is following that example.

Internal

Your HR department will build its employees’ skills and habits and train them on how to handle every issue. It’s up to you to make sure that your customer service is the one under your control, and if that’s not the case, then you need to reinforce it with the people you’re using it for.

Your employees are the future leaders of your company, and since customers will be under their influence, they should set up an environment that makes them feel valued and respected. Just being friendly to your customers will start to rub off on employees, and a good customer service culture will then draw them in further.

There’s one position within your company that should be given maximum priority. This is your customer service director. That’s the person responsible for ensuring that every customer is met with the most positive experience possible. They need to make sure that all the guys behind the scenes have the skills they need to carry out that job effectively. It may sound like an easy task to make sure your employees are well-trained in responding to every customer request, but it’s actually really hard.

Over all, it’s important to make sure that your employees are treated as equals, and that there’s a well-informed and supportive culture. As part of that, the culture of every team must play an important role. Everyone will be expected to come up with solutions, and in doing so, they need to train one another to do the same.

That kind of high-quality culture can attract customers and improve retention, all while ensuring that your employees feel like they’re their partner in success.

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 a customer-service culture? 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!