Tag: tasks

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!

How to Boost Your Customer Support Team Performance

Posted on by Eric Klimuk

Your company’s customers should benefit from a culture that expects them to succeed in their efforts to purchase from your customer support team.

A winning customer service culture implies that people that work for your company have a highly flexible and approachable attitude towards providing service to customers. In turn, this will not only cause your business to grow, but it’ll also result in your customer base becoming more satisfied with you and your customer support team in a unique way

Knowing how to build a winning customer service culture in your company will be essential if you’re looking to attract and retain clients. However, there are plenty of things that you can do to ensure that your company’s customer service culture is seamless.

It starts with building employee engagement

Employee engagement is extremely important in the workplace. As the saying goes, people buy from the people, not the company. Therefore, if you can deliver a high-value customer experience to your employees, then it will lead to other benefits that you can’t anticipate.

This includes lower turnover rates, higher productivity, and improved customer retention. It can also mean making more informed decisions within your customer support team, further increasing the effectiveness of your marketing and sales teams, and even reducing technical challenges you could face while trying to sell something.

Therefore, it’s important to build employee engagement into your overall strategy for creating a winning customer service culture. This will help you to expand your business through existing and potential clients. When you can keep your current employees more engaged, you can be sure that they’ll share your vision of your company and work toward improving their business processes.

It’s also vital to have some sort of employee training program in place if you want to build a winning customer service culture.

Train your employees on processes they’ll find easier to use as well as on the available tools they’ll need for their work. For instance, you should have an in-house training program for employees in customer service and sales so that they can provide you with a consistent quality service.

For example, the team at Windmill Foundry, a solar integrator, claims that their customer retention rate has increased by nine percent thanks to their customer training program.

It also pays to run some internal surveys to gauge what the key issues of the organization can be improved upon. Ask staff about their level of satisfaction with company policies and procedures, which can be found on the company website.

Ask employees what their customers want to see more of and it can show you what your company’s goals for building a winning customer service culture really are.

A great way to streamline processes and make your customer service department more effective is to find a customer service platform like Supportbench, that can help you automate and streamline certain tasks. A customer service platform can be set up to handle particular tasks, such as responding to inquiries or writing orders, and when used correctly, it can boost your productivity as well as cut down on other employees’ work time.

This could be valuable if you’re looking to automate tasks that are unrelated to core business tasks such as responding to customer queries. We see our customers use the Supportbench platform to help streamline a number of different tasks:

Chat – This conversational tool facilitates online communication with your customer support team using text or email, and you can set it up to handle the majority of your customer service inquiries as soon as they appear in your inbox.

Schedule appointments – By messaging a user’s mobile number, it can let you schedule appointment reminders via email.

Require users to pass out documents – It’s just one of the many ways you can use this system to automate everyday tasks.

Contact the customer – It’s smart to ask customers when they’re free for a meeting or should they give you a phone call.

Visualize and plan – Gather the feedback from employees, customers, and other stakeholders to build a future plan for how you’ll improve customer service. This will then allow you to identify the areas that need improvement and will help to improve the customer experience.

It’s important that you’re continuously reviewing these processes, processes, and standards to improve customer service. This is especially important if you’re running a call center. In fact, if you regularly make changes to your processes, then it’ll be much easier for your customers to tell whether they’re getting a quick, successful response from your customer support team.

In summary, a winning customer service culture involves a lot of communication between your employees and customers. Alongside improving processes and systems, the use of customer training, employee feedback, feedback from consumers, and automated systems are all key factors in developing a thriving company culture.

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 support team? Contact us today!

Building a Customer Support Engagement

Posted on by Eric Klimuk

Bad customer support engagement can mean bad customer satisfaction. When a company can’t keep customers coming back and keep them satisfied, it can damage its long-term business.

Manpower shortages or lack of employee engagement are often what causes bad customer support.

One solution to this is to challenge all your employees to become more resourceful. That’s easy enough to say but learning how to do it is definitely harder. As the leader of a customer service team you need to learn how to steer your employees so that they can get more done.

Understanding at which level of responsibility staff members should be held is important. From the manager, to employees working directly with customers, you need to know their roles, responsibilities, and how they should be performing them to produce desired results. That way, you can really drive toward results and fix problems efficiently.

Realizing that a strong business support service requires the cooperation of the whole team, involve all staff members in setting up your team rules and structure. They should not only be part of a committee, but should also be directly part of the business and responsibilities.

Being a part of a customer service team, it is your role to hear and address the concerns of your customers however it’s not enough to just be their advocate. You should foster an environment where they feel heard, understood, but also provide with the capacity to handle their issues by themselves.

That’s a big start. To get started with this, you will need to establish a little platform for customers to share their issues with you, have such conversations regularly – not just with customers, but also with your employees, vendors, clients, new partners, customers, and even other members of your staff (even the ones not connected to customer service).

This is how you can gather data to begin compiling an encyclopedia of answers and solutions to whatever questions and problems your customers may have regarding your products or your service.

We know that businesses, who are just starting, out may find that building an engagement system may be overwhelming at first but there are customer service software like CRMs that would make it easier to communicate with your customers. Some of them would allow your staff to communicate with multiple customers at the same time and even have the capability to capture the customer’s email and reference number making further conversations easier, uncomplicating the process of registering and reminding your staff of what their issue is.

Customer service systems make it easy to establish a relationship with every customer and keep them pleased. If you’re building out an innovative new system, then that new system needs to facilitate an ongoing dialog with the customers. It is important to have a conversation that’s completely functional, yet something that can foster a relationship with customers.

Customer service communication technology has evolved tremendously making it more convenient for your organization to respond to the feedback of the customers. Your ability to do so will define how successful you will be.

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 great customer support engagement? Contact us today!

How Can You Build A Customer Service Culture?

Posted on by rpsstudios

Customer service culture is arguably one of the most underrated areas of leadership and management. It is an area of sales and service that is often overlooked when starting a company. But building a customer service culture within your organization will ultimately increase profits by improving customer service and enhancing a brand.

But how do you create a customer service culture? And are there specific things to do to build a successful one?

Collaborate with the rest of the organization

Being part of an organization can help build your customer service culture. People may think that management is where the best customer service ideas emerge. But one area where it can feel like an outsider is the place where you place your own initiatives. But at some point in every company, the likes of staff and the rest of the team must show interest in doing better customer service. People must see that they have the power to make their employer and colleagues more responsive to them. Where senior personnel are happy, it means that the rest of the team feels comfortable making recommendations. These recommendations are built on a strong culture of collaboration, transparency, and a pro-active approach to resolving problems that may arise.

Building a customer service culture is one thing, but getting everyone on board is another thing entirely. Of course, training and development should be a priority of every department of a company but the culture at your workplace must also be a part of this. It’s not enough for your employees to learn to provide customer service. You must demonstrate how you intend to put the training into effect. For example, do you go into them asking them to help with their daily tasks? Or, do you send a message to them that your department team members want to work alongside them? This will send a message that your company is serious about its customer service program. It demonstrates that if you invest in people that you care them. And employees won’t fully cooperate if they don’t feel cared for and appreciated.

Instead of assuming that employees are skilled at customer service, you should provide them with training and coaching. Give them the knowledge and ability to handle situations them give them a chance to handle those situations. Whether it’s taking order for a team on sales or as a customer service representative, employees in every department need to get hands on experience as best they can. You can arm them with proper training but good customer service is better learned through actual practice.

Establish a strong direction for your organization

You need to establish a strong direction if your organization wants your employees to have a winning customer service culture. Staking out a stand of strength and support for your employees should be your mission statement. That’s the first thing you can do to help your team ensure success.

Be clear in what your objective is. And having that clarity allows you to create your work environment in a way that enables that focus. If you have a clear goal for your role in the company, that makes it easy for your employees to fit around it. And it also allows you to have collaboration, as you create your success and you get to higher levels of your company.

Train your employees

Second, you need to find the resources to train your employees, including on-site courses or virtual training opportunities. You need to empower your employees with online learning capabilities – tools such as online training portals and a solid knowledge base. Don’t forget that training doesn’t have to come from a textbook – online lectures and interactive flashboards allow you to do this. It will make your job easier if these employees are constantly on the move learning new things and uncovering new techniques and know-how to create a good customer service culture.

Give them the opportunity to grow

And third, you need to make sure your employees have the opportunities to learn and grow. They need the opportunity to practice their skills and the “chance” to improve the skills they are already proficient in.

When disseminating information to your employees, choose an easy, non-intrusive way to get the message out to them. Allow them to talk, ask questions, and provide feedback. This way, they can learn and grow.

Don’t expect them to be experts right away, don’t forget that your employees are just starting to learn. Encourage them to read articles that are relevant to your industry, to learn lots of new things. This lets them grow and advance their skills without the pressure of being judged on something they have not done before. And this is an active process, not a passive one where you only start training when you think they do.

When your employees get used to the process, they should initiate their improvement themselves. And once they demonstrate their ability for self-development, you should further encourage them and provide the coaching they need to expand further into the field. The goal is not to show the development, but to prepare an experience that you believe your customer will find useful. Your goal isn’t to create a wonder worker, but to empower them in a way that allows them to discover their gifts and use them to make your customers’ lives easier creating an stellar customer service culture.

Wouldn’t you want your employees to be a part of the building of a great place where your customers thrive and grow? Does that appeal to you, too? Don’t leave the learning for your employees. Start your own learning collaboration. Help your employees get better. Connect with them, be a partner, and contribute to what they do. Connect with them and their opportunities, and join in on the learning together.

They will engage and grow as much as you and when that happens, there will be a lot to share with their customers. I think these are the three key things that you can do to unleash their potential.

Smart workers must have a purpose. Some companies create no purpose, and they leave an empty boardroom with no people.

Build a company culture. Anything outside of that purpose isn’t going to be going to make a difference to the company’s performance. People who are not bringing their vision and their purpose into the realm of life inside of the company, and uniting around that aspect, will be working up against that wall and not getting the growth or the success. Not all of the ideas have to create a big splash, but maybe they help a few customers, then they’re still ideas that can be considered for implementation. Your culture must have that purpose.

Let’s say you have a restaurant. Do you or your staff have a set of skills and talents that help you create that magic? Do you have any retail skills, or any type of front office experience that can help you make dining in your restaurant easier for your customers? Or do you have marketing skills and sales skills? Do you have anything else you can bring to the table? And would customers enjoy it and benefit from them? Are customers complaining, or are they saying there’s no reason to come to your restaurant? If your establishment does not have a customer service culture, you’re only going to get poor reviews and poor sentiment, and in the end, a failed business.

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 create a customer service culture? Contact us today!

upport? 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!