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Customer Service is How You Show Customers You Care

15 May 2013/0 Comments/in Customer Experience, Customer Service/by

Customer service is how a business shows how much it cares about its customers.

Sounds pretty basic and something that everyone should already know right? Well, unfortunately, it doesn’t always happen. Actually, most of the time organizations fall short, way short in the execution of the customer service experience.

Win the customer with customer service

There’s a clear difference between wanting to offer great customer service and actually delivering an exceptional customer service experience. It’s something that too often is taken for granted and customer service goals and customer experience mission statements pass as being customer focused, when in reality the same mediocre bad customer service is peddled again and again with customer loyalty scraping along the bottom of the barrel. Customer is service is how every business shows how much it cares about its customers.

Great customer service can help keep customers through tough times

During difficult economic times or whenever a competitor released a new feature or runs some promotional price, your customers are eager to leave you simply because they feel no love from you. Customer service is how your business shows your customers how much you really care about them.

When customers feel that their expectations are reached and exceeded, it generates the positive connection feelings between your customer and your brand. The more of that feeling that goes around, the more loyal your customers can be. The more loyal the customer, the more apt they’ll be to be a vocal promoter of your product or services.

Live and breath customer service

As a customer service leader, you typically have no control over your company’s product. You don’t control development. You don’t control the features. You don’t control the quality. You don’t control the price. You have little control over product or offering. But when it comes to service deliver, you hold the keys to the kingdom. Become obsessive about the customer experience. Own customer service. Live and breath customer service. Love customer service. Make great customer service delivery the pinnacle of your organization.

Own the customer service experience

You can make delivering exceptional customer service the daily mission for your team. Base employee performance primarily on the quality of the service experience they deliver. You can teach the mechanics of work actions like answering emails, speaking on the phone, or help people be faster on a computer. But converting them into customer service all-starts? That’s a more difficult challenge. Set the bar hight and recruit the very best customer-focused people to join you in your quest.

Make customer service experience you deliver unique. 

Make the customer service experience you deliver personal.

Make the customer service experience you deliver matter.

The key to great customer service experience is showing customers how much you really care about them. It’s obvious. It’s simple. It’s easy to do. Lay out the principles for how it should happen. Leverage the available technology to let you scale it to your customer base. Enable your people to create moments of magic with their customer service skills. This is the strategy for connecting with today’s customers in a more meaningful way.

Random vs Planned Customer Service Experience

13 May 2013/0 Comments/in Customer Experience, Customer Service, Management/by

Every customer service experience action should serve a purpose in the overall customer service experience you want to deliver.

The idea that your customer service experience actions should have a purpose suggests that it requires real planning in order to deliver the type of customer experience that makes a difference to your customers.

Planned Random Customer Service Experience

Many people are often surprised to learn that I often recommend creating enough freedom in your customer service experience plan to allow for random acts of service to take place. Most often it’s these random moments of customer service that makes the biggest impact in creating overwhelming customer loyalty.

What is a Random Customer Service Experience?

Random customer service happens when our customer service people just do what comes to mind when working with customers. No scripts are followed, there’s no plan for following any set procedure in working with a customer. Customer service actions are free to take place based on customer circumstances and the results are influenced based on what’s happening with each individual customer scenario.

What is a Planned Customer Service Experience?

But we can’t expect random acts of customer service to always happen and to always end up with a positive overall result in our customer experience. It takes a dedicated effort with planned customer experience in mind. Ultimately we need to know what we want to achieve from our customer interactions and how we can put our people in a better position to deliver those results.

Maybe it’s outlining general principles that your customers appreciate. It may be a specific type of action if a customer problem takes place. It might be identifying a process for your people to follow every X number of customer interactions. The idea is that at some level, you have to think about what you want from your customer encounters and outline your expectation from your customer service representatives.

The plan should lead to eliminating a bad customer service experience from happening and instead creating the type of environment where you can expect the best customer service experience to be the norm.

What is the purpose of your customer experience?

It’s critical that you as a customer service leader always keep in mind the overall goal that you want to achieve. It can’t just be, deliver great customer service. Instead, identify a measurable result that you can use to tell if your great customer service actions are working. The key is that it has to be something you can measure:

  • Reduced customer complaints
  • Increased customer renewals
  • Lower customer waiting time
  • Faster customer case resolution

As long as it’s a goal that you can measure, you’re on the right track. It then comes down to creating and communicating the plan to achieve those customer service goals.

What is the purpose of that customer service action?

You have a goal for what you want to achieve with your customer service experience. That can be easy to define. But what about the purpose behind your customer service experience mission? Why do it? Why does it matter? What do you hope to achieve by successfully delivering on those customer service experience actions and meeting the experience goals you have?

It doesn’t matter is it’s a retail customer service experience or an online digital service experience.

Defining your customer service experience purpose will inspire the right type of service action and focus on the best customer service experience goals.

Describe customer service experience

Look at who’s making a difference. Learn from the best customer service experience examples.

There’s a BIG difference between the Zappos’ of the world doing fantastic things in behalf of customers and making gobs of money while doing it, and the typical call center for some random company that is struggling along the way. Both take customer service action, there’ s some element of customer service experience in both places, but at Zappos, they’re united in their purpose of making customers happy, making the experience of shopping online perfect. What’s your terrible call center place doing? Not that.

So have a purpose behind your customer service experience goals. Clearly define the why you are going to serve your customers. Establishing your customer service experience mission and the real purpose to why you care about service will help you stay true in the service experience decisions you have to make.

Making Your Website More Customer-Friendly

06 May 2013/0 Comments/in Business, Customer Experience, Technology/by

Your business’ website is one of, if not the, main ways that customers interact with your business, so making your website customer-friendly is critically important for your business to succeed.

Some of the fundamental principles on web usability, or user experience, as it is called involve making things easy to find, using clear navigation, and being consistent. Here are some handy tips for satisfying your online customers.

Designing customer experience Website

Better Web site navigation customer experience

Navigation is probably the most important part of making your site customer-friendly. If you’re creating a new website, take the time to lay out each section of the site and think about how each part should link together (one technique is to use post it notes to represent each page and rearrange them while you think).

Good navigation allows users to decide which parts of the site to visit, rather than forcing them to go where you want them to go. The site’s navigation should match up with the sorts of tasks users will perform on the site. Create a site map that is easy for customers to find and that clearly shows where each page is and it contains. Another aspect of good navigation is to make it possible for the user to easily get out of wherever they are. This can be accomplished by making the site header a link back to the main page, a prominent “log out” button, or bread crumbs.

Think of the mobile customer experience

Mobile-first design is a relatively new design philosophy that is based on the concept of designing a website that works for mobile devices and then scaling the site up to work on PCs and larger screens. Since there are 1.2 billion mobile users world-wide, more people are accessing the Web via mobile devices.

About 25% of people are “mobile only,” meaning that a smart phone is their only device for accessing the Internet, and all those mobile-also people still use phones to access the Web. This is where mobile first design comes in: it uses the concept of “progressive enhancement” to make sure that a fully functional website can be viewed and used on mobile devices and that this website can be gradually enhanced as it is scaled for tablets or PC screens.

It might sound weird to start with designing for mobile, but in generally, sites designed with limited screen space or other user limitations in mind are designed more gracefully and will work for a larger percentage of customers than a PC-first design. Plus, most mobile first designs look good and are very readable on a larger screen, which is customer-friendly in its own right.

Testing is part of great customer service

Testing is another great way to make sure that your site is as customer friendly as you think it is. After working through navigation and designing with a mobile first attitude, recruit users for testing. User testing is one of the best ways to make sure that your website will be customer-friendly. Watching users react to your site can be a truly eye-opening experience.

To do user testing, create several tasks that are representative of what you want users to do when using your site. Have the user describe what he or she is doing and why he is doing it and make notes about what you see the user doing as well (often what the user does is more revealing than what he or she says). It can be beneficial to contract a testing firm to conduct usability tests because they will know what to look for and be able to interpret the results and translate them into ways your website can be improved.

Customer engagement is the ultimate goal for any business Website

Engagement for users is also a part of having a customer-friendly website. Most customers now expect that websites have some ability to interact, either via comments, a Twitter feed, or maybe even a form. Think about your business and what form of interaction will be meaningful for the website.

Consider enabling users to submit product reviews and have a mechanism for users to vote for or promote reviews they found useful. Use videos that show things like how to use the product and encourage customers to submit their own videos to your site. You can also engage customers by keeping your content fresh; relevant and current information is the best way to keep customers happy with your service.

The most important thing to consider when trying to create or improve a customer-friendly website is to take as many pains as possible to make your site functional, simple, and pertinent to both new visitors and loyal customers alike. Show that your number one goal is to provide the customer with what they are looking for in the most convenient way you can.

Web Self-Service, The Future of Customer Interface

02 May 2013/0 Comments/in Communication, Customer Experience, Customer Service/by

30% of online shoppers say they are more likely to complete a sales transaction when live web support is available.

Considering that almost three quarters of internet users are now spending 25% of their disposable income online, that 30% suddenly starts to look very significant.

The advent of social media means that an expectation for rapid response in customer service is upon us. There are now so many customer touch-points that brands are rapidly running out of excuses to deliver a less-than-seamless online experience.

Customer service focus

“Customer Democracy”

We’re living in an age where consumers are demanding a choice in how they interact with brands and are beginning to form pretty unified ideas of what they want. At present, a minority of brands measure up, with just 34% currently considered to provide a ‘good’ customer experience.

Unsurprisingly, an overwhelming number of online shoppers are fed-up of the call-centre experience, with almost 50% agreeing that it’s the most frustrating service channel. Considering that a reported 60 million hours are wasted on hold with call centres every year, it’s not difficult to decipher why.

On the other hand, attitudes to web-based chat applications are improving; 62% of consumers report being responsive to live chat (up 52% from 2011), and 77% of live chat fans cited rapid response as its most valuable feature.

Your customers crave real customer service

Given this apparent universal reluctance to pick up the phone, it’s no surprise that:

  • 72% of consumers say they would prefer to sort out their customer service query online,
  • 60% attempt web self- service as the first method for resolving transaction issues, and;
  • 50% of all smartphone users would prefer to use a mobile customer service application than dial a customer helpline.

In fact, as many as 25% of consumers say they would abandon a website or seek another solution if they couldn’t find what they were looking for, so there’s never been a more vital time for brands to ensure their customer service vision is leading edge.

Good customer service benefits customers and companies

The good news is that it’s not just the consumer who benefits from multi-channel communication. Contact centre staff costs are the largest annual expense for businesses, often totalling up to 60% of operational costs. Web chat on the other hand, enables agents to deal with five or six queries at a time, resulting in significant productivity benefits.

Not to be short-changed, however, if service levels are below par or overly complex, consumers will return to the old faithful customer service via telephone.

With 21% of UK businesses alone expected to implement online customer service within the next 12 months, time is of the essence. In the competitive online marketplace, brands should act quickly to ensure their customer service is as streamlined and efficient as possible.

‘Numero’ is a world-class software solutions provider, dedicated to helping first-rate companies deliver exceptional customer service over any channel.

Winning Customer Service

Flavio Martins

I'm and I'm on a mission to end bad service. Great customer service is easy, and successful businesses are finding that it's the real key to creating long term loyalty and success.

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