7 Good Customer Service Practices To Outlast This Covid-19 Pandemic
Through the proliferation of digital technology, consumers seeking good customer service practices from businesses have become much more proactive nowadays.
This is because in modern times, more so during this COVID-19 pandemic, customers are becoming increasingly inclined to do their own research and even control their customer journey, and have a voice which they are unyielding to make it heard by their preferred brands in the marketplace.
Now, this must be accepted without any doubt that the customer’s voice is one of the most potent assets that a company has to build a relationship with present and new consumers in the marketplace since the voice of the customers can either sing your praise when everything goes well or even get extremely loud when they are unsatisfied with their brand’s products or services.
Therefore as customers can easily make their opinions public through social media and other channels (which can be both great and concerning for businesses) upholding good customer service practices is extremely important for brands that are looking for consistent business growth.
Now, this age of the “connected consumers” has driven home another important point whereby consumers in the present times want to be treated like people, and also want to purchase from people, which has reshaped how customers and businesses connect and create a working relationship between buyers and brands that are something more than just mon-and-pop shops.
In other words, customers nowadays expect services that are not only quick and exceptional but also consistent.
Therefore to provide that level of support and put them into proactive actions we as one of the award-winning vendors of CRM for small and medium businesses have highlighted seven actions in this list of good customer service practices, whereby irrespective of your industry or business size these best practices will lead to success:
- Hire The Right People, And Treat Them Well
Always remember that your employees are the brand diplomats of your company. Hence maintain connections with your customers through them. Moreover, your customer support department is the key to customer retention. Therefore make each hire an absolutely vital part of your company.
For this take extra time during the hiring process to ensure that your new hires are the best customer service agents that you can have. Be competitive in terms of pay and benefits and make the job rewarding and fun by adopting gamification, showing genuine appreciation for hard work, and establishing other methods for boosting employee satisfaction since it is only when you hire and retain exceptional service agents, world-class customer service will follow.
2. Dexterously Manage Customer Expectations
In all industries across the globe, customers expect the world. Nevertheless, promising them the world might not be the best tactic to follow, since what happens when you make a promise that your company is unable to keep? Therefore, it is rather prudent to tell your valued customers exactly what they can expect from your business, and thereafter work hard to surpass those exceptions.
This is because, when the customers observe that you are willing to trudge the extra walk, you will not have to fret and fear about damage control for unresolved promises.
3. Secure Your First Impression
Remember you will never get a second chance to nail your first impression. This has become more true in businesses today as consumers are becoming more connected in the present times.
In fact, when customers have an experience (both positive and negative), they have a lot of power over your businesses’ reputation and bottom line.
Customers will often share stories related to their experiences with different companies, or carefully choose which businesses or brand they will invest their money and time in, and even recommend products and services to their friends and relatives based on personal and subjective experiences.
Now all these can happen within seconds from a smartphone and can affect your relationship with consumers who have even never heard of your brand.
Therefore, keeping these thoughts in your mind, provide your brand’s support agents with incentives for astounding both new and long-term customers, since customer relationships that start strong are much more likely to stay strong in the times to come.
4. Collect As Much Information As You Can (And Use It)
Good customer service practices rely on the information. Therefore, as your support agents interact with your customers, train them to collect important information by asking the right and pertinent questions and thereafter ensure that the information is correctly collected inside an easy to use CRM software platform.
Collecting relevant customer-related information not only helps to establish a productive dialogue between your business and the customers but it also provides your company an opportunity to achieve two major tasks:
• Improve your ability to personalize interactions
• Receive and implement valuable feedback from your customers
Additionally, as in modern times, consumers need to shift, the right questions, data, and analytics can help your business to adapt your brand to serve them better in the long run.
5. Personalize The Relationship
Your business CRM tool is an invaluable software for helping your brand personalize its customer interactions with the consumers of your offerings in the marketplace.
This is because CRM is a business growth technology that in addition to gathering, organizing, and analyzing data, even provides your customer support agents to track the preferences and purchase or support history of every customer stored in the CRM database.
Therefore, even when your customer support agents are working with any customer onsite, or are away from their office, cloud-based CRM software solutions which are mostly mobile-friendly tools allow your employees to access and collaborate on up-to-date data.
Therefore web-based mobile CRM solutions empower businesses to turn around traditional customer support into a guided 1:1 customer journey which helps in decreasing churn rate and retain the customers.
6. Be Where Your Customers Are
Nowadays consumers have several channels they can use to contact their preferred brand or businesses, and so one of the most obvious best practices in customer service is to remain available on the channels that your customers want to use.
For example, while a business providing funeral services might not need to remain active on Instagram to connect with its customers, a theme park or an ice cream parlor doing business in your area will certainly not find its target audience on LinkedIn.
Hence do your research on where your customers are and how they want to interact with you, which can include text messages, phone calls, social media, live web-chat, online forums, and several other options to choose from.
In fact, the multi-channel customer service experience is the new norm (with omnichannel not far behind), whereby you need to equip your customer support department with the right tool like a robust CRM platform like Salesforce or any other equally reliable Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions mostly used by SMBs that can help your service agents to remain ever-present, efficient, and knowledgeable to provide world-class service to your customers.
7. Maintain Your Focus
It is very easy to say that your customers are the lifeblood of your business. Nevertheless to be truly customer-centric in your approach, clearly define the customer service standards for your company, and then request everyone, right from the CEO to the newest hires to remain focused on the customer.
For this it is imperative that you must keep the lines of communication open throughout the company and even between your employees and your customers, provide your support agents with the right tools they need to provide service, and reward them when they do it successfully for your company.
Conclusion
According to research while it has been found that 78 percent of customers expects the level of service to remain constant across departments, if it is not, 73 percent of the consumers say that they would start looking at other brands and 72 percent of consumers expects the company representatives to have the same information across departments and expects consistent experience across channels while doing business with any brand.
Therefore, in a nutshell, these statistics prove that modern customers must be considered more than a number and must be part of a relationship, which can mean making major changes to a company’s standard operating procedures for providing world-class customer service and experience that results in business growth.
