4 Actionable Tips to Improve your Customer Service Strategy
4 Actionable Tips to Improve your Customer Service Strategy
Customer service is vital for any business to retain its customers and gain more value from them. Through top-notch customer service, businesses can reduce the acquisition cost of a new customer and cultivate a loyal user-base. Your user-base will act as brand ambassadors, and double as case studies and provide testimonials and reviews. Here are four actionable tips to improve your customer service strategy.
When you invest in customer service to delight the customers, they remain engaged with your brand for the long-term.
You’ll also find that they and convince their personal and professional network to interact with your business. After all, positive reviews are more effective in gaining new customers than the marketing campaigns by your business and are cheaper.
With the incrementally high costs of acquiring a new customer, retaining an existing happy user is all the more important.
Ask these questions:
- How to earn customer loyalty?
- How can your customer service agents woe the customers to not only come back but also refer their friends and family to purchase from your brand?
To answer these questions, here are the four actionable and proven tips to improve your customer service strategy.
#1. Collect feedback.
As customer needs vary depending on the industry you are targeting; good customer service looks different for every business. Instead of assuming what your customers want, use a customer satisfaction survey to receive their perspective on your business.
123FormBuilder
This way, you can identify what your audience requires and provide customized solutions. These forms can be in the feedback request sent after the purchase is made, or after an interaction is completed with the customer. You can ask for ratings using Net Promoter Score Surveys (NPSS) or even a detailed form built for personalized browsing or checkout experience. The reports generated by these feedback forms can form the basis for personalized customer service strategies.
Don’t miss this chance of enhancing your products and improving the customer experience.
#2. Know your average response time.
Customers want fast solutions to their queries. 66% of customers report that an important part of good customer service is the company valuing their time. Ace up your efficiency by developing a workflow that streamlines and co-ordinates with different support departments and functions. By reducing the average response time your website visitors and customers are less likely to get distracted or navigate away from your website.
To speed up the average response rate, eliminate internal confusion to reduce the delays. To remove the confusion whether the reps replied to the customer query or not, use a shared inbox.
Kayako’s shared inbox
As communication is transparent and visible, everyone in the team is updated about the responses that are pending. With multiple users accessing the inbox, teammates can respond to clients in real-time.
Further, you could adopt a helpdesk to manage and automate customer service tasks to help your team stay organized, prioritize work and fastrack the customer query response rate.
ProProfs Helpdesk software
#3. Customer support through SMS.
A staggering 52% of customers prefer to text a customer support representative over other channels of communication. With over 5 billion people sending and receiving SMS messages globally, consider including SMS texting in your customer service arsenal, to communicate with the users.
For small businesses whose marketing budgets are restrained, customer service over SMS is a good option because it works on all phones, needs no separate app downloads, and is independent of the internet. It allows your customers to follow-up, respond to your text message instantly, and interact 1:1 with your support team.
Some etiquettes to remember, while sending SMS messages to your audience are these.
- Get written consent from the customers before reaching out to them over SMS.
- Collect their phone numbers through signup and contact forms while mentioning that you would reach out to them over text messaging for customer service updates.
- Consider messaging at the right time, preferably regular business hours.
- Avoid sharing sensitive information that the customers may not be comfortable discussing over text.
- Escalate to a phone call when the problem becomes too complex to handle over SMS.
TextMagic
Don’t shy away from publicizing that your customers can reach out to you by SMS, which shows your commitment to offering excellent customer service.
#4. Use content to support your customer service.
Along with generating leads, your content can also be used to increase customer happiness and satisfaction.
The support team knows the most of what your customers require, complain and recommend about your business. It becomes all the more essential to connect your content creators with the support staff. The content that answers all the questions your audience has, can be used to deliver value to the leads and clients. The blog content that is filled with statistics and insights can be used by the support team to increase customer loyalty.
Start by identifying the 10 most frequently asked questions your support team receives. Identify or create content to answer those questions in the form of easy to understand resources. Ensure that your support team understands the same content and uses it to answer the queries.
Also, you can use email gated content to send people down the sales funnel. This could take the form of a previously recorded webinar, podcast, or an e-book. People who have contacted you are already interested in your offering. Instead of sending them through a boring and long demo, consider this soft sell.
In cases where the questions are straightforward, you could direct the visitors to the FAQ page or knowledge base where they can find corresponding answers. For technical questions that are complex, take the help of videos, case studies and how-to-posts to help them understand.
You can do this yourself or hire a content writing agency to help you create content that retains customers and nurtures leads.
Conclusion
Delight your customers with a stellar customer service strategy. Your customer service reps have a tremendous influence on your business, revenue, sales and overall growth.
They are an important touchpoint to delight the existing and potential customers.
Invest in a proper customer service strategy taking into consideration the 4 fool-proof strategies mentioned above, to serve your customers.
Image Credit: Andrea Piacquadio; Pexels
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