Customer service is an essential element of business operations that influences your bottom line and counterfeits how the public views your company. So, providing good customer service means being a reliable partner to your customers. It goes beyond helping them troubleshoot, use, and make informed decisions about your product.
The customer service journey is different for everyone. Some buyers may quickly make their purchase and move on, why others may return with a customer complaint or question. Either way, the objective of customer service is to make the most of every interaction and develop long term relationships with your customers. Also, customer service has observed a dramatic shift with the recent advancement in communication and digital technologies. Consumers have become more aware and tech-savvy. Thus, making customer service a crucial factor for business success.
What is Customer Service?
Customer service is the support you offer your customers from the moment they first contact your business to the months and years afterward. It’s the deciding factor for whether a customer will frequently buy from your business or not. Thus, investing time and energy into creating a positive customer experience will produce major returns. Besides, today’s marketplaces are entirely customer-driven. With a plethora of choices available within almost every industry, companies are struggling to attain customers. It’s not only the product and its price that businesses are competing in but also customer service.
Why is Customer Service important to business?
Customer service is the key factor of consumer’s choice of loyalty to a brand. This signifies that by providing excellent customer service, businesses can retrieve customer acquisition costs and nurture a loyal customer base that will refer colleagues and friends, write customer reviews, and serve as case studies or testimonials. So let’s look at the reasons why customer service is so important.
- It builds a positive brand image
Every organization requires a good reputation to strive in this hyper competitive marketplace. With an excellent customer service department, companies can create a positive reputation. A positive public persona can strengthen the way people see your company, products or services. When you treat customers as they want you to treat them, the chances are high that your business gets positive reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations.
- It helps retain customers
When it comes to customer retention, it is equally important as customer acquisition. A business flourishes better when old customers keep returning for new purchases. This again depends on how well the customer service representatives uphold their role. For instance, if customer service team has a seamless procedure that makes online returns quick and simple, you’re more likely to retain customers and build a loyal customer base that appreciates your no-hassle return policy.
- It reduces overall business issues
A business with the best customer service department can reduce the overall problems associated with business operations. When customer service agents are friendly and supportive, customers refrain from creating unnecessary issues and also prevent instances of litigation.
- It develops excellent customer service relationships
Your customer can be the best form of advertisement for your business. Besides several types of advertisements leveraged for customer reach, word of mouth is a highly trusted form. It helps build trust with customers and people in the community.
- Boost Employee Retention
Employees want to work for companies that treat their customers fairly. When you employees see that your company is focused on delivering exceptional customer service, they will be more likely to become advocates for the business. They are also far more likely to remain with the company and be fully engaged in their work.
- Generates referrals
Positive word-of-mouth referrals come directly from previous and existing customers that have had a great experience with your company. They tell their friends, relatives and colleagues and may even post to their social network about your friendly and helpful customer service. Their contacts, in turn, feel encouraged to buy from you. Word-of-mouth advertising is often a company’s best and least expensive form of advertising.
- Gives you a competitive advantage
Great customer service does more than just win over new customers and retain loyal ones. It also sets you apart from the competition. By offering best-in-class customer service, you are attaching values to your company’s brand, strengthening your reputation in the market place and showing by example that you care about the people who purchase your product or service.
Therefore, it’s undeniable that excellent customer service can open the door to significant business partnerships and several other business opportunities. However, this depends on the type of customer service you render.
Types of Customer Service
Every customer you come across is different. They vary in their expectations. But, one identical thing amongst them is they expect speedy customer service. So, you need to determine which communication channel will achieve this efficiently.
- Phone Service
This is the most popular and often used customer service types across the world. It offers a quick way to the customers to present their problems and help companies to assess a customer’s emotions in a better way.
- Email Service
It allows customers to send a query whenever they find it convenient. Such a service can be utilized even after working hours. Besides, each email conversation can be archived at any time.
- On-Site Service
This is a very convenient solution for customers as the service is delivered to their home or workplace. On-site service includes teaching, consulting, appliance repairs, and more. It offers the business a chance to know their customers closely.
- Live Chat Service
Live Chat is a must-have online business tool. As it integrates with chatbots, it serves as a viable customer service solution for businesses. It allows customer support agents to handle multiple conversations at a time. This tool is very popular because it provides customers with quick and direct support compared to typical phone conversations. Not only do customers usually reach service agents within a matter of seconds with live chat, but the instant and web-based format usually means customers can multitask when wait times do occur.
- Social Media Service
Social media channels like Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram etc. enable companies to engage with their customers via private chat, group discussion, and post comments. As questions and responses about your business’ service are open to the public, anyone with the same concern can easily have a solution.
- FAQ Service
This is one of the most hassle-free customer services as compared to others. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) represent questions and their answers on a specific subject. As it remains accessible 24/7 on the business’ website, customers can resolve their issues easily.
- Customer Self-Service
Many customers prefer solving their issues on their own prior to contacting customer support. So, companies provide a knowledge base that includes training materials, webinars, video tutorials, demos, and more to enable customers to seek information instantly.
With the growing customer needs and changing expectations, you might require adopting omnichannel customer service strategies. It ensures that your customers’ queries are resolved in a professional and timely manner.
Ways to Optimize Customer Service Experience
Effective customer service is one of the most valuable assets of any organization, and technology can allow optimizing customer service.
- Leverage Social Media Platforms
In the current digital age, social media has become indispensable. People are connecting with businesses and brands through different social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. So, it is inevitable for companies to follow their customers on social media and engage in healthy conversations.
More likely, dissatisfied customers vent their anger on social media channels. If you are present on these channels, you can look upon the complaint as early as possible and solve it before it impacts your business. Since it is the very first interface a customer chooses, addressing the issue there itself will eliminate the chances of escalating it to other platforms.
- Add Live Chat to your website
Having a Live Chat on your website yields fruitful results. It’s a way of personalize customer support experience. Besides, it has become one of the most popular customer services and support channels. Moreover, Live Chat is often seen as the most effective medium of communication through which customers can find their issues resolved faster.
Nowadays, businesses are utilizing advanced tools like Live Chat Widget such as Freshchat plugin to win more clients right from their website. It helps companies acquire details of new leads and increase the chance of converting them into customers with instant response. This widget notifies the customer service team as soon as any contact fills the form via Live Web Widget.
Such tools can help consumers contact customer service and support on the spot as soon as they run into difficulties. Moreover, Live Chat resolves issues without any inconveniences and delays. Besides providing help to customers, it works to accumulate customer data and feedback that further optimizes the customer service efforts.
- Verify Customer Data – Utilize the benefits of CRM
With Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions like one from Freshworks, companies can centralize customer data on a single platform. It lets you quickly access all the information related to customer’s transactions, interactions, appointments, and more.
It provides a 360-degree view of the entire customer history. Further, integrating your CRM platform with a business phone system can help take your customer service to the next level. This integration enables your customer service team to place and receive calls right from the CRM and view customer details while saving time. Further, it adds to offering a customized experience to your consumers and thus wins their trust for your brand.
- Automate Common Tasks
Automation is the key to business success. It frees up customer service representatives from redundant tasks and helps them focus on more critical issues. Apart from this, deploying advanced tools can help enhance your client communication experience. For instance, Sprout online invoicing tools that enable your team to create and send invoices from anywhere.With a pool of in-built invoice templates, your team can readily create and send professional invoices from anywhere, any device, and at any time. It works seamlessly with various payment gateways, including Flutterwave, Paystack, PayPal and Stripe. Thus, your company can process payments in multiple currencies at low fees. Further, it sends automatic email reminders for late payments.
Optimizing customer service thus reduces the need for direct customer service and also cuts down on how long a live representative spends with each consumer. This means live agents are free to invest their time and efforts on more critical issues.
Final Thoughts
Customer Service is never set in stone. Instead, it’s a continually evolving process that yields the best results when tailored to an individual’s needs. Putting these segments into practice and harnessing the power of advanced technologies can lay a foundation in enhancing and refining customer service that gives you happy customers and boosts conversions in the process.
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Thanks for sharing. I read many of your blog posts, cool, your blog is very good.
Thank you