With digital technology becoming commonplace, customers have become a lot more proactive. Customers now do their research before choosing to engage with a company, giving them more control over their customer journeys; users now have a voice, and they make sure those voices are heard.
Today your customer’s voice is one of the most important assets for your company. Sure, your customers’ voices can sing your praises when everything’s going well, but they’ll almost always be louder when they’re unhappy. With the rise of social media and other digital platforms, customers can now directly connect with businesses, as well as each other; as such, it’s never been easier for opinions to spread.
The importance of customer service and providing your customers with great experiences is undeniable. Companies are starting to realize that, according to a 2020 Digital Marketing Trends Report. Companies are finding that their customers’ expectations are rising, and they expect every interaction to be a great one. So how can you give your customers the best experience possible moving forward?
Whether you’re managing a team or are looking to improve your customers’ experience on a company-wide level; here are some customer service tips and skills that can help you, your team, and your company be at the top of your game and deliver a consistently excellent customer experience.
Your Customer Service Team is Everything:
Your customer service staff will be the front-line of your business; that’s why it’s critical to support them by providing them with the best possible training. Ensure that you do whatever it takes to make your staff feel confident and clear on how to do their jobs, whether that’s through formal courses or easily accessible online materials.
Set high standards: After conducting your research and fully understanding your metrics within your industry. Your staff also needs to understand how valuable their role is and that their contribution is taken seriously. Set standards for your expectations, and be clear about why those expectations matter. Setting these metrics clearly will help your staff members feel confident in their ability to do their jobs.
Set up a clear escalation pathway: Your customer service team will inevitably come across questions and problems that they can’t solve independently. As such, you need to prepare for the eventuality by forming and communicating a clear escalation plan that lets everyone know whom they should contact to answer the questions they can’t answer.
Set up customer journey touchpoints: Think about your customer service offering in the context of the complete customer journey, this will give you better insights into how much your customers know, what their goals are, and the interactions they’ve already had with your business.
A culture of excellence: It’s a well-known fact in the customer service industry that happy employees make for happy customers. When your employee experience and customer experience goals align, you can start building a culture around the customer experience, one that will have the employees engaged and committed to their work.
Managing Live Queues
Managing your live queues is a crucial part of running an effective customer service operation.
When customers reach out to your support teams via the various support channels available to them, their messages are converted into support tickets stored in a queue. You can think of this queue as the inbox for your customer support team.
But how can you track the effectiveness and efficiency of said teams? To simplify the process, we broke it down for you.
Customer Satisfaction Rating:
The first and most prominent indicator of the performance of your overall customer service team is customer feedback. It’s easy to gauge your team’s performance through the response they get from your customers.
Understanding your customers’ positive and, more importantly, their negative feedback will help you identify where your service needs improvement and allows you to come up with ways to do that.
Use Fast, Efficient Tools:
You can have the best customer service team; However, if you stick them with slow, glitchy, or unintuitive systems, or if they can’t access the information they need, the result will inevitably be a poor experience.
It’s crucial that you choose a CRM that provides contact center tools that support expedited resolutions while providing a stress-free experience for both your customers and your employees. When looking for a platform, it’s also a good idea to find a solution that can integrate with the other business systems you’re currently running to provide real-time data spanning your operations; for example, a solution that combines billing and authentication so that customer service agents can manage a user’s invoicing issue from the same place where they can manage their access to your services. Making it more effective and efficient.
Monitor Active and Resolved Tickets:
Keeping tabs on your active and resolved issues will allow you to understand how efficiently your system works. If your operation runs efficiently, it should be promptly dealing with issues as they arise; thus, their list of “Active” tickets should be shorter than the list of “Resolved” ones.
If that’s not the case, then you’ve got an issue that needs further investigation. There are several reasons why the list of active tickets might be longer, whether it’s a bad product batch, a glitch in the system, a drop in performance, or anything else really; you’ll need to identify and address the issue as soon as possible.
Monitor the Rate of Escalation in Complaints:
Your complaints queue is never going to be empty; that’s just a reality. However, a steady and minimal flow of complaints coming in is normal for a healthy business. But if you find that there’s an unusual surge of complaints or that your complaint tickets have been steadily increasing without a corresponding growth in the number of customers or products, then there might be a problem. That’s why it’s essential to track this metric, which lets you evaluate your company’s progress over time.
Regular Sprints:
Your team should be fully in context with your customers’ problems and concerns, as such you should set regular meetings to raise the team’s spirits and identify the blockages your team members encounter most frequently in their daily interactions so as to handle the problems before they arise.
Conduct Weekly Quality Audits:
Develop your criteria and strategy to ensure that your customer interactions run smoothly while guaranteeing an excellent customer service experience with every transaction. It’s a good idea to audit these interactions weekly to ensure that your team’s interactions follow your strategy; this will help your company identify problems as they arise rather than allow them to escalate.
Your agents need to understand their performance in their interactions with your customers, conducting these weekly quality audits will also allow you to effectively coach them to consistently improve performance.
Efficiency is Key:
The essence of your customer service, you need to track precisely how much time it takes for your team members to respond to your customers. If the customers are processed through the system promptly, then they will be less likely to be frustrated and give negative feedback; your system must connect your customers with the correct representative as quickly as possible.
Final Thoughts:
Customer expectations have changed. We now live in an economy driven by experiences. Business has evolved, and customers have come to expect more than products and services. They expect high-quality experiences as a standard. Study after study shows that customers are willing to pay more for a better experience and that most people are willing to cut ties with a company after a bad experience. That’s why it’s more important than ever to ensure that your company’s customer service is on point.
It’s why you need to make sure that your customer service agents are equipped with the right tools, training, and system that will allow them to resolve issues the first time around. This will lead to higher-quality support and less annoyed customers. However you look at it, an excellent customer service operation is crucial for success. And that’s what Pelcro brings to the table.
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