In the world of marketing and e-commerce, nothing matters the most than providing a quality customer service. The reason behind this? Simple: Satisfying client needs to translate into increasing conversion rates, or to put it into simpler terms – increasing sales.
But yet this task is often neglected by many brands on the rise, sometimes taking over a week to truly provide an answer to most customers’ due lack of communication among departments of the same company. The result? Bad referrals for your absence of feedback and cooperation; and nothing can sink the business ship faster than bad reputation these days, especially among social media.
Efforts made to introduce review applications at blogs and websites can be diminished by neglecting what users are telling us since that isn’t a confidence vouch for a new-coming customer that randomly lands on our site.
Therefore, which are the actions needed to ensure a quality customer service these days? Let’s state three simple ways in which we can boost the performance of our crew and immediately translate this into business success!
Turn bad experiences into happy customers
There is no better testimonial for a brand than to quickly solve an issue that was caused, probably, by a misunderstanding. It’s a typical situation for the daily job of a customer service operator, and yet many elements are left behind for rate that service as proficient.
Whenever an angry customer slams an issue either via mail/phone/chat we always need to remind the same motto: “customers first.” It may sound ridiculous under the circumstances like demanding a refund for a faulty product when you happen to know that the product itself isn’t the problem but the customer bought it without considering its usage terms but said the approach is prone to give us a boost in sales as a reward.
Customers love to be pampered, and even if you believe your side of the story is the right one, always put yourself in the shoes of the client; besides, if you were in his/her situation, you would have wanted to get a straightforward answer the sooner, the better.
Keep several options at bay, like for example giving a compensation product for the inconvenience the customer experienced: that’s a winner move!
Give your staff coaching and resources
You cannot expect your clients to be happy if your customer service crew doesn’t have the sightless idea of how does your business work, or if they can’t answer in time simple questions that can decide the outcome of purchase.
Photo courtesy of Startup Stock Photo
Through your communication channels, the staff available must have a throughout knowledge of every aspect of the brand: from the name of its CEO to amount of visitors per month, best-selling products, and most useful guides to recommend on how to use your products.
Naturally, you can’t expect customer service operators to answer high-end technical issues – that’s what managers/editors/directors are for, but the operator needs to be resourceful enough to debate in whether the respond in the question asked is among its knowledge or if specific attention is required ASAP. In case no one is available to answer at the moment – which can happen – instruct your crew to have a plan B like asking for name and mail address (or phone) for specialized staff to contact them during their work shifts.
Consider also investing in better methods for communicating with people, like hiring the services of a live chat client, or phone contact. In case you decide for the latter, quality headsets are a necessity as the voice communication needs to be clear enough for customers to understand step-by-step instructions. You can check some beautiful products at sites like HeadsetPlus.com
Availability is the key to success
The best way to catch potential issues with your product/service or any other inconvenience is by covering a 24/7 customer support. How can this be possible? Hire enough personnel to cover the broadest range of hours possible and always answer questions in less than 2 minutes. Instruct operators to log off chat services if they need to do something else that won’t let them respond as quickly as expected: nothing gives worse image than a poorly managed chat service.
Photo courtesy of Markus Spiske
In the case of mail contact, depending on the demand at your mailbox, all emails should be answered within a range of 12 hours – that’s the best approach for guaranteeing customer loyalty.
Another valid resource to apply is to contact users after several days of completing their purchases, to ask if the product acquired satisfied their needs, and also to ask if your brand can offer them any further help, or – in case the customer already contacted you for support – to request if no other issues showed up after inconvenience was dealt.
