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How to Achieve Customer Service Excellence: 5 Tips That Always Work
How to Achieve Customer Service Excellence: 5 Tips That Always Work
Customer service excellence can make or break your brand. Prioritize customer service excellence and strategize to build an excellent brand reputation. Here are five handy tips.

While building a successful business, every aspect calls for attention. Everything is essential, including your product, tech, design, distribution, marketing, sales, manufacturing, and a myriad of other resources. From that pile, why prioritize customer experience?

The answer is simple: happy customers lead to more money, growth, and sustainability. But, you know this already, don’t you?

I am not here to convince you why customer service is essential. I am here to help you prioritize it strategically.

This is precisely what we’ll be talking about for the next few minutes. This article will revolve around the know-hows of customer service excellence and how to achieve it. Here’s a quick rundown:

Customer Service Excellence Can Make or Break Your Brand

Customer support is where your brand comes to life. Your frontline teams and their interactions with customers make the biggest impression. Plus, it shouldn’t be surprising to know that today’s consumers (specifically social media users) have grown accustomed to getting what they want. Their expectations have risen immensely.

In a recent poll, 82% of CEOs reported that customer expectations were “somewhat” or “much” higher than they were three years ago.

Salesforce Survey

 

The frustration rates in today’s customers are much higher, and they’re quick to share negative experiences online. Through social media, customers can reach a large audience very quickly.

You cannot improve sales without continuously striving to redefine your standards of customer service excellence. Most customers stop doing business with a brand due to one bad experience. Customers sign up for a product or service, but a good customer experience is what makes them stay. Hence, it has become crucial to support customers on every channel from day one and establish a customer service excellence trademark.

Benefits of an Excellent Customer Support Strategy

Customer support experience is a vital cog for businesses of the 21st century. So much so that companies with bad customer service receive a lot of bad press. Research reveals that in the U.S, businesses lose around $62 billion each year due to bad customer experiences.

Your customer support defines your company’s long-term success. Excellent customer service leads to customer loyalty, higher revenue, and increased retention. It is not merely enough to attain acceptable support; companies must strive to excel! Organizations need to focus on becoming more customer-oriented.

Benefits of Customer Service Excellence

Benefits of Customer Service Excellence

Customer Service Excellence Meaning

Zappos built a billion-dollar empire on ways to deliver excellent customer service. Customer service excellence is one of their company values. Their tagline goes: “Our purpose is simple: to live and deliver WOW.”

Providing good customer service can differ from one business to another. What is considered good service? Is it even possible to define excellence? Well, when you’re talking about service, you can! There’s an acceptable line difference between simply providing service and customer service excellence!

Customer service excellence is when you have a personalized, respectful, and smooth approach. Excellent customer service helps you provide customers with all the assistance and have a perfect customer experience. This approach is not only limited to post-sales support; it also needs to be applied before and during the purchase.

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Key Ingredients For Customer Service Excellence

Before discussing the hows, let’s first look at the three key ingredients of customer service excellence.

1. Customer Convenience

Customer Convenience

Customers should and must get service at their convenient time, through a convenient channel of their choice. Ensure that you are available on all modes of communication, including chat, messages, calls, social media, etc.

2. Speed

Most users expect a response in less than 24hrs. For live chat, it is less than 1.5 mins, and for the phone, 3 minutes is considered good (though rare).

First Time Response Benchmark

First Time Response Benchmark

Never keep your customers waiting. Customers want a quick response, no matter how complex their queries are. Make sure you have the quickest first-time response.

3. Proactive Response

Importance of Proactive Response

Importance of Proactive Response

If you take the initiative of contacting a customer when a problem arises, you are prioritizing the issue at hand. It also shows that you are acting with urgency and understanding. This type of vigilance is what separates excellent customer service from the rest.

Go the extra mile to reach customer service excellence. This is when you have ticked all the boxes.

4. Empathy

Customer Empathy Phrases

Customer Empathy Phrases

A company cannot be successful with an apathetic culture. With customer empathy, you can gain a competitive advantage. Ask your agents to put themselves in the shoes of the customers when working on queries.

Example:

An Amazon customer ordered a PlayStation for his son. When the package was delivered, the customer wasn’t home, and so a neighbor had signed for the delivery package, who then left the package outside the customer’s door. Unfortunately, it disappeared. Well, Amazon was not to blame for this mistake. But they were quick to resolve this. They sent a new PlayStation in time for Christmas without charging the customer for extra shipping.

This is an excellent example of customer empathy. Rather than sticking to their refund policy, they chose to do good. And that is what matters!

How to Achieve Customer Service Excellence: 5 Step Approach

5 Step Approach

Step 1: Define What Customer Service Excellence Means to Your Brand

We don’t want to push our ideas on to customers; we simply want to make what they want.

Laura Ashley

 

There is no one definition of excellent customer service. Your idea of excellent customer service may differ from that of your competitors. You just have to standardize what it means for your brand.

Excellent customer service consists of:

* Meeting customer’s expectations

* Personalizing to your customers’ needs

* Solving customer problems and responding fast

* Recognizing when the customer needs help

* Using tech like chatbots to find out what customers want

* Customer empathy and showing a positive attitude

2. Step 2: Analyze and Improve

Use data to back up and analyze the performance of your team. You need to continuously plug the gaps in your support process and keep improving your customer experience. You will need many reporting and analytics tools at your disposal to paint a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not.

When you truly analyze your customer support, you’ll find multiple loopholes and places where you failed to deliver. Following pointers shall help you analyze your support and improve.

I. Can your customers reach you easily?

This is the most critical part of analyzing your existing customer service. Find out if your customers can reach you when they need it or not. Make sure that your channels are working fine and that you don’t miss even a single customer query.

II. Is your team clear with your vision of customer service excellence?

Make your support reps understand your idea of customer service excellence and work collectively to achieve it.

III. What are the loopholes in your existing support?

Find out the loopholes in your existing support. You can do this by sending a customer survey. Let them give honest feedback and share their pain points. Maybe then you can actively work on solving it.

IV. Fix your mistakes

Not taking responsibility for your mistakes is a sure-fire way of getting a bad reputation. Transparency is crucial and always guarantees high-quality output.

Step 3: Upgrade to the Latest Tech

If you want to serve a personalized experience, you’ll need more than just your legacy tools. Firstly, you’ll need an omnichannel tech that lets you manage every channel from a single interface. This will ensure that your customers reach you through their preferred channels.

It would help if you also had self-service tools at your disposal. Customers don’t always want to talk to an agent to get their problems solved. 81% of customers attempt to take care of matters before reaching out to a customer service executive. Hence, your helpdesk or customer service tool must provide self-help features.

You’ll also need advanced ticketing features like automated ticket registration, ticket assignment, ticket conversion, SLAs, collision detection, email templates, etc. It is precisely where the versatility of DeskXpand helpdesk comes into the picture. DeskXpand is helpdesk software that allows you to communicate with your customers in real-time through their preferred medium.

You’ll be glad to know that DeskXpand instantly converts your received emails into support tickets, but that’s not all. DeskXpand opens up additional avenues of communication through customers’ favorite social media channels. That’s right! Your team will even be able to field direct message inquiries from multiple channels.

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Step 4: Practice Creative Problem Solving

Around 80% of customers churn because of a single bad customer experience. That is why you must thrive on solving problems for your customers and make it a central part of your support workflow. And there will always be problems that need solving.

The Legendary Example of Zappos:

Zappos once sent free shoes to a best man the night before the wedding. This was after his order was sent to the wrong location due to the mistake of the delivery company. This is precisely what I think exemplified customer service is. They won a customer for life, and the story won the hearts and pockets of millions of people.

Always seek to solve customer problems creatively and in a manner that makes them feel valued. Nothing can be more personalized than this. Meet their needs in ways that go above and beyond their imaginations and expectations.

Step 5: Ensure Quick and Personalized Response

40% of customers say they want more personalized and human service. Customers always want to feel like more than just a ticket number or a target number. They get furious when they are not being treated as a person and being batted like a tennis ball to different people.

Similarly, customers want to interact with a person and not a robot. It is part of the reason why many businesses send gifts to their customers on their birthdays. It is not possible to do this for everyone, but companies must go off script and serve a personal touch whenever they can.

Final Step: Work With Experts

An amazing experience can turn a satisfied customer into a brand advocate and promoter. Delivering service excellence has a significant role in fuelling your company’s flywheel and generating positive reviews and retention. All these things will matter to the company’s bottom line. This perspective will allow you to keep the company’s goals in mind as you’ll put customers first.

Businesses must be built around how to deliver excellent customer service. It is easy to forget the importance of customer service excellence when building your brand’s web presence and marketing your website. I hope the above five steps will help you provide truly excellent customer service.

The easiest way to excel in customer service is to drop your legacy helpdesk tools and adopt technology to serve your customers better. And with DeskXpand, it is easy to get up and running in no time. When a buzz started to develop around customer service excellence some years ago, our experts came up with a long-term and feature-rich solution. With DeskXpand, you can:

* Offer personable services and personalized experience

* Manage your customer from a single interface

* Analyze your support and generate reports easily

* Manage all the ticketing information through integrated third-party tools

* Provide support on communication channels of your choice

* It is time to ditch your legacy helpdesk tools. Try DeskXpand now! We are an ISO27001 certified helpdesk development company trusted by users worldwide for 14+ years now.

The Article is Originally Published On:

https://www.deskxpand.com/blog/customer-service-excellence/