Last updated on November 6th, 2024 at 05:31 am
Every business needs to nurture its customer base. After all, these people provide the means for the gears of the business to keep on turning.
Besides offering an outstanding product or service, one of the most effective channels to keep your customers happy is by having them go through an effective customer service process.
This department is responsible for ensuring that customer inquiries and concerns are properly addressed. They’re there to be the listening ear to the customer—and hopefully, the problem solver of their dilemmas.
The purpose of the team is to make customers satisfied with the business, and hopefully convert this satisfaction into sales.
That said, a bulk customer service is not entirely about problem-solving. It’s about being effective communicators and patient mediators. It involves concluding the interaction with customers in a way that they gain value from the exchange.
If you’re a new or up-and-coming business, you may be wondering: how do you increase customer service quality, then?
This article will show you six tips you need to know to uphold superior customer service quality in your business. Let’s jump right in.
Speed is crucial
As the old adage goes, time is money. We’d place our bets that not a single person wants to be on hold for 30 minutes on their phones waiting for a customer service agent to respond or get back to them.
As such, if you want to improve the customer service experience for your customers, see to it that their concerns are promptly addressed and solved.
Train your staff to be responsive and quick to chat, all while still maintaining a deep sense of understanding of the customer’s concerns. Set reasonable KPI targets, like having your staff answer 90% of inbound calls in under 15 seconds.
Furthermore, if you constantly find your business line being overloaded by customer calls, consider expanding your line network.
Many business phone providers like 1300 Number from Telcoworks offer scalable solutions that can allow more agents to answer calls, allowing your customers to get their concerns aired out more quickly.
By being speedy with your responses, you can improve your customer’s satisfaction and make the customer feel more valued. This, in turn, can lead them to have increased loyalty towards you.
Gather customer feedback
Engaging your customers is key to getting repeat business, and one way to do that is by asking them for feedback.
Feedback isn’t only about data gathering; it’s a holistic process of empathising with the customer and knowing how they feel about their customer service or brand experience. In short, it’s all about reaching the heart of the customer.
That said, you must take the feedback to heart and turn it into something actionable for your business. You should also consider systematizing your feedback-receiving scheme so that you can determine what your strengths and weaknesses are, and take appropriate action accordingly.
As a company, you should constantly strive to improve your processes, and feedback is a great way to know your pain points. It can also be the needle to help you align your services with your customer’s expectations.
Furthermore, getting feedback can signal to customers that you’re committed to conducting your business with them in mind. This can foster loyalty and customer satisfaction, which can spell the difference in having them seek out your brand or your competitors.
Set service standards
No business wants to be on the receiving end of a berating review online.
Unfortunately, poor customer service can compel already-frustrated customers to air out their grievances to your social media page or Google reviews, tarnishing your business’s reputation as a result.
To prevent that from happening, it’s important that you set a benchmark for performance for all your customer service team members. You want them to be consistent in delivering quality service, and one way to do that is by setting measurable goals for them to achieve.
For instance, you can incentivise the team to perform well by defining measurable goals for them to reach. Quantifiable goals can include response time, resolution rate, and customer satisfaction levels.
You may add more or less goals depending on the level of service you wish to uphold. These guiding figures can serve as a standardised measure that your staff can look into for every customer interaction.
Furthermore, don’t skip out on onboard training. Create a training manual early on and have your staff read it. Then, as a part of training, allow them to perform some mock calls under supervision at the start. Then once they get a hang of things, they can do their job more independently.
That said, be sure to offer regular training too so that your staff will be up to date with the best practices.
Hire the right talent
While training can be done to set a uniform standard for all employees, you don’t want to just hire anyone who submitted their resume.
Go for folks who have an affinity towards empathy, problem-solving, and patience. These people hold the traits to naturally excel in customer service.
Furthermore, if a person has past, years-long experience in a customer service role, consider them as priority hires too. These people have the wisdom to navigate real-world customer service challenges from the get-go.
That said, the biggest difference maker would be the interview. Throw them a bunch of questions and scenarios and see how they would respond to it. Choose the ones who are in it for the long haul.
From there, you can choose the best fit and the most likely candidate to be a part of your team. Even customer service outsourcing could play into this to help reduce your overall costs.
Harness the power of personalisation
In a time when tools like AI chatbots are running rampant, customers can feel unheard in their pleas for help.
As much as possible, give these customers a chance to speak to real agents when they feel that their case is particularly complex. Not everything can be answered and resolved by reading the business’s FAQ box.
Furthermore, when conversing with customers, it’s important to make them feel like you’re actually engaging with them rather than selling to them.
Use their names when speaking to them. Use relevant information and analytics like segmentation to know what to cross-sell. Give them special discounts based on their purchasing behaviour.
One way to do that is by upholding a personalised experience at each touchpoint of the customer service journey. Leverage technology like CRM systems to automate the process while still giving a sense of personalisation to your customers.
By tailor-fitting your personalisation tactics per customer, you’re showing that you care for them on an individual basis, which can foster loyalty and satisfaction in turn.
Employ a multi-channel availability
Customer service isn’t just about optimising the one-on-one chat with the agent. Your customers would also like to have a good deal of options on how they want to contact your business, whether it be by phone, email, live chat or social media.
As such, if your company is big enough, consider setting up these channels and setting at least one agent in charge of these channels at a time. You can utilise a social media-centric integrated communication system to manage these interactions more efficiently.
By doing this, you’re ensuring that customers can reach you the way they want to. This can show that you care about your customer’s convenience and time, which can lead to overall satisfaction.
