In a competitive marketplace filled with similarly-priced products with comparable features, your customer experience might be what sets you apart from the competition. Ultimately, when you deliver stellar customer experiences, you’ll attract and retain more customers, serve them better, and generate more revenue.
81% of customers say that a positive customer experience will let them make another purchase from a business. With that in mind, we’ll share some great customer service tips you can use right away to improve your customer experience.
Understand Your Customers’ Needs and Expectations
At the core of delivering a stellar experience, you must understand who your customers are. When you do, you’ll know why they love your brand, what they like about your products, and what they don’t. In turn, you’ll understand their needs and expectations. You can then align your customer experience to meet these needs.
Be Personal
Nowadays, customers want to be treated like people and not just another transaction. So, one of the tips for customer service is that you must be personal in all your interactions with your customers. Doing this enables you to build more personal, deeper relationships with your customers, and it makes them come back for more.
There are several ways you can do this. For instance, you should always address your customers by name. You should also avoid sending generic emails and other communications, and rather send personalized emails and messages. Also, you can improve your marketing efforts by injecting personalization into your marketing strategy.
Show Your Customers You Value Them
The importance of saying thank you can’t be underestimated. It will show your customers that you value them and that your business sees them as people and not just a way to generate profit. The perfect way to do this is to send personalized thank-you notes whenever you can. Ideally, you should send a thank-you note when you ship a product to a customer.
Once again, you should avoid using generic notes and focus on sending customized, personalized notes for every customer.
Emphasize Communication in Your Approach
Stellar customer experiences are based on excellent customer service. In turn, excellent customer service relies on effective communication between you and your customers. To communicate effectively, you’ll need to use several strategies.
For one, you should actively listen to your customers’ problems, concerns, and feedback. Another effective strategy is asking questions that will help you understand your customers’ challenges better. Ultimately, using these strategies will help you serve your customers better and improve your customer experience.
Solve Customers’ Problems
For excellent customer service, you must solve your customers’ problems and challenges effectively and efficiently when they arise. This means your customer service teams should help customers to solve their problems as quickly and effortlessly as possible.
Simply put, the more time your customers have to spend on contacting customer support and the more agents they have to speak to, the less satisfied they’ll be.
Use Positive Language
When your customer service team interacts with your customers, they should always consider the tone and vocabulary they use. Here, it’s always better to use positive language. When they do, they’ll not only show empathy for the customer’s problem but also that they’re confident to solve it.
Ultimately, this prevents escalations and reduces customers’ frustration levels which, in turn, encourages a better customer experience.
Manage Expectations
We’ve already mentioned the importance of understanding your customers’ expectations. Here, it’s also important that you do not create expectations you can’t meet. As such, it’s vital that you set realistic expectations with your customers and manage these expectations if you want to offer stellar customer experiences.
In contrast, if your customer service team sets expectations they can’t meet, distrust will follow and the valuable relationships you’ve built with your customers will break down.
Reward Loyal Customers
One of the better customer service tips to increase customer satisfaction is to implement customer loyalty programs that reward your most loyal customers. With these programs, you’ll be able to drive more sales and generate more revenue.
An added benefit of these programs is that you’ll build and foster more loyalty, which, ultimately, turns your customers into promoters for your business. This might be some of the most effective marketing you can get.
Offer Fast and Convenient Customer Support
We’ve already mentioned that you should solve customer issues as quickly and efficiently as possible. However, this refers to when your customers are on the line with an agent.
In addition, you should also ensure that you give your customers the tools to get in contact with your support team quickly and easily. So, customers shouldn’t send an email or message and wait for hours or days to get a response. Fortunately, many tools help you do this, from automated emails to chatbots, live chat, and many more.
Expand Your Customer Service Efforts to Social Media
Nowadays, customers spend a lot of time on social media. As such, they often use it to get in contact with and interact with businesses. You should thus expand your customer service by including social media. When you do, you’ll be able to meet your customers where they are and simplify the customer support process. In turn, this will help you improve the customer experience.
Provide Around-the-Clock Support
Another helpful tool you can use to improve your customer experience is by providing 24/7 support to your customers. For one, nowadays, customers don’t necessarily have the time during working hours to contact businesses to solve their problems and issues. Also, when you have a global customer base, you can’t limit your customer support to only certain hours of the day.
Give Your Customers Self-Help Options
Customers don’t always have the time to spend minutes or hours on the phone or on emails to solve problems or even make simple administrative changes. As a result, you should provide customers with self-help options they can use to solve simple problems, change account or shipping details, and more. This, ultimately, saves them a lot of time and makes for a better customer experience.
Follow Up Consistently
Once you’ve helped a customer solve their problem, irrespective of the channel, you must follow up consistently to ensure that the issue doesn’t resurface and to assist customers with any other difficulty they experience. In addition, when you follow up with your customers, you’ll learn more about their feedback and where you can improve your customer experience.
Use an Omnichannel Approach
As mentioned, you should implement several channels to support customers wherever they are and at any time of the day. To improve the customer experience even further, you should use an omnichannel approach. When you do, every new interaction with a customer will feel like a continuation of earlier interactions. This provides customers with seamless and efficient customer support.
Offer Effective Refunds, Guarantees, and Discounts
There’s nothing that damages the customer experience like defective products or products that don’t meet customer expectations. As such, you should implement effective refunds and guarantees to keep your customers satisfied when they’re not happy with a product. In addition, you should also consider using discount programs to drive more loyalty and generate more revenue.
Use the Right Tools
To implement all the strategies mentioned above to make your customer service more efficient and effective, you’ll need to use the right tools. This might, for instance, include email automation, chatbots, live chat, social media messaging platforms, and many more. There are tons of these tools available on the market, and you should find those that meet your business’s needs and requirements.
Don’t Forget the Human Touch
Despite using all the tools mentioned earlier, you should never neglect the human touch in your interactions with your customers. Even though automated and other technological tools can make customer support more convenient and streamlined, customers still need to speak to a human agent from time to time. When this happens, you should ensure that you have the facilities to meet this need effectively.
Use Customer Feedback to Improve
As mentioned earlier, you need to know and understand your customers’ feedback about your customer experience. But this feedback won’t mean much if you don’t use the insights you get from it to improve your customer experience. As such, you should learn from your customers’ feedback where your team is performing well and where you can improve. You can then implement the necessary strategies to do so.
Keep Your Customer Service Team Satisfied
Apart from keeping your customers satisfied, you should also keep your customer service team happy. When they are, they’ll be more engaged. And when they’re more engaged, they’ll be more motivated, perform better, and, in the process, serve your customers better.
Continuously Measure Your Performance
Simply put, you can’t improve something if you don’t measure it. So, you’ll need to continuously measure and track your customer service metrics based on several key performance indicators that are relevant to your business. This allows you to assess your team’s performance and see the effects of any strategies you implement to improve.
Summary
Hopefully, this post showed you some of the best customer service tips and customer service advice you can implement to deliver a stellar customer experience. As mentioned earlier, you’ll need the right tools to implement many of these strategies.
And one of the best tools you could use is ULTATEL’s Cloud Contact Center solution. 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.
