Tag: supporting

Many businesses have the same goals: to restore and improve customers’ trust and improve their bottom line. However, restoring trust, as well as increasing the revenue stream, for some businesses seems impossible.

In such cases, customer service 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.

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.

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-service process 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.

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!

Hiring a customer-service manager is the first step in bringing customer-service 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.

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.

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? Contact us today!