When a customer is faced with several products with the same features and similar pricing, which one will they choose? It’s simple, they’ll likely buy from the business where they’ll get the best customer service. In fact, many customers see this as the most important consideration when buying a product.
Considering the above, it’s vital that your customer support is up to scratch. But what does this mean? In other words, what is good customer service? To answer this question, we’ll look at what good customer service is, why it’s important, and some good customer service examples in this post.
What is Good Customer Service?
Nowadays, good customer service is about more than helping customers solve the problems they experience with your products or services. It’s about meeting your customers’ expectations across your entire business.
As a result, great customer service includes all the touchpoints customers have with your business and all interactions you have with them. Some examples of good customer service situations include when customers browse your website, visit your store, place orders, confirm the payment information, contact your customer support team to sort out issues, and more.
When customers get good customer service from a business, 62% of them will recommend the business to a friend.
Benefits of Having Good Customer Service
It’s no secret that good customer service skills can help you build valuable relationships with your customers. Apart from this, there are several other benefits to having good customer service, including:
- Turning your customers into promoters of your business.
- Increasing customer loyalty, which results in higher customer retention rates.
- Enhancing your brand’s reputation in a competitive market.
- Creating more upselling and cross-selling opportunities and generating more revenue.
- Increasing staff satisfaction, which, in turn, results in your staff serving your customers better.
- Attracting and retaining the best talent.
- Increasing business growth and profits.
- Enhancing your product and service offering to align with what your customers want and expect.
10 Real-World Examples of Good Customer Service
Now that we’ve seen what good customer service is and its benefits, let’s look at some excellent customer service examples.
1. Placing Your Customers at the Center of Everything
When you want to deliver stellar customer service, you should take a customer-centric approach in everything you do. One of the best customer service experience examples here is a company whose core value is to deliver excellent customer service.
To achieve this, the company, for instance, lets all new hires, including its management, spend two weeks on customer service calls. In this way, everyone understands their customers’ needs and how to serve them better.
2. Adding a Personal Touch to Customer Interactions
One of the best high-quality customer service examples is a company whose employees always greet customers by their names. This shows that the company considers its customers to be individuals and not just a way to generate profit.
This type of personalization allows you to build stronger relationships and create more loyalty, which turns your customers into your business’s most vocal supporters.
3. Responding Quickly
To deliver excellent customer experiences, it’s vital that you, like many other companies do, respond quickly to customer complaints and feedback. This not only shows customers that you value their opinions, but also that you want to serve them as best you can.
Even better is when you can be proactively helpful. This means you should anticipate your customers’ needs and expectations before they even tell you about them. When you do, you’ll be able to help your customers before they contact you for help. In this way, you’ll solve small problems before they become bigger challenges.
4. Following Up Consistently
Excellent customer service doesn’t stop once a customer has bought a product, and extends well beyond that. For instance, some companies send their customers personalized thank you cards, while some e-commerce retailers use personalized thank you videos for the same purpose. In turn, some companies reach out to their customers on their birthdays and holidays.
This shows that you appreciate your customers and, as a result, allows you to increase customer loyalty.
5. Asking for Feedback
We’ve mentioned how you can improve customer service by consistently following up with customers after they’ve made a sale. Many companies also use this opportunity to ask for feedback about the business, its products, or its services. Another example of this is when companies send out surveys to ask for feedback about their offering.
Ultimately, this shows customers that companies value their opinion. In addition, it shows transparency and a willingness to receive feedback, no matter if it’s good or bad.
6. Providing Customers With More Options
Nowadays, customers don’t necessarily have time to spend on the phone or waiting for emails to solve their problems or ask for advice. As such, in order to provide good customer service, it’s important to provide more options that make customer support more convenient for your customers.
For example, one company predominantly used voicemail for their customers’ questions. Once they realized that their response times were suffering because of this, they implemented other channels including email and social media to serve their customers better.
7. Using Customer Feedback to Improve
We’ve already mentioned that asking for feedback shows customers that their opinions are valued. However, to go one step further, it’s important to, like many companies, incorporate customer feedback into your offering.
As such, you should try to incorporate customer feedback where necessary to improve customer service processes, add product features, or find ways to serve your customers better. Customers see this and value the opportunity to be part of a business’s success.
8. Offering Omnichannel Experiences
Nowadays, omnichannel experiences are all the rage, with many companies implementing them as part of their customer services strategies. For example, as mentioned above, many companies allow customers to contact and interact with them through email, on social media, and by using live chat.
But, when using omnichannel approaches, there’s a streamlined flow of communication across all these channels, which makes every new interaction feel like an extension of previous interactions. This seamless approach and consistency lead to deeper customer relationships.
9. Finding Opportunities to Impress Customers
Beyond adding a personal touch to your interactions with customers, small things can go a long way to increase customer loyalty. However, to do this, you’ll need to find these opportunities to impress your customers.
For example, one business started giving away free products to their most loyal customers. In turn, a customer posted about this on their social media platforms, which led to the businesses gaining a lot of new followers.
So, not only does this increase loyalty, but it also increases the chances of customers referring their friends and family to your business.
10. Limiting Customers’ Risks
In a competitive market, it’s often challenging for customers to pick the right product. In these cases, they’ll typically choose the company where they get the best customer service. And one of the best customer service experience examples to show customers that you provide good customer service is to limit their risk when making a sale.
To do this, you’ll need to have effective return and guarantee policies. For example, one clothing store implemented a very lenient return policy that incorporated no-questions-asked free returns. In doing so, they limited their customers’ risks and increased the chances of customers buying a product.
Putting It All Together
Hopefully, you now understand what good customer service is, and you’ve seen some examples of good customer service, so you can improve your business’s customer service.
When you do, you’ll need the right tools. And here, ULTATEL’s Cloud Contact Center solution is the perfect fit. It provides your business with a streamlined and comprehensive communications solution that allows you to communicate and engage with your customers, no matter what platform they choose.
