In today’s world, ‘good customer service’ determines the difference between success and failure pertaining to a business or brand. Support practices have long been perceived as mundane – both, from a helpdesk agent’s end, as well the customer who interacts with the brand. Adopting customer service best practices is mandatory nowadays.
Customer service is a skill comprising various tactics and methodologies to deliver personalized experiences to customers. And brands strive to perfect this skill to stay ahead of the curve. Businesses indeed, more than earning revenues, want to be known as the provider of great customer service.
52% of consumers say they have made an additional purchase from a company after a positive customer service experience.
Further, since a company’s CRM structure designates the course of customer support service management, implementing and utilizing its benefits in the most optimal way becomes crucial and strategic.
Top 10 Customer Service Tips
Enlisted below are the top 10 customer service tips that may come in handy. Cheers to happy resolutions!
1. Be present at every customer support touchpoint
Greet your customers wherever they are. On the desktop, mobile app, over the phone, on social channels. Sync information seamlessly, coming in from varied devices to always stay in touch with the customer help desk software. For instance, pick up a query shared on the brand’s (Facebook) live chat and continue it on the Email thread.
Strive to provide contextual support so as to serve the customer right. Context makes support more feasible and simple. An agent who savors background information of a customer resolves more effectively than an agent who tries to build a context himself without any prior knowledge.
Source: Statista
2. Share newsletters/emailers
Timely emails help you stay on top of the minds of your patrons and induce brand recall at every stage. Product launches, announcements, and upgrades must be communicated to the customers. Newsletters are quite an optimal part of an effective customer support service strategy, i.e., they keep customers informed and add value to their mailboxes (if made interesting and relevant).
3. Make powerful decisions using Reports
Interpreting data can take you far, but interpreting customized data can take you farther. With Kapture, businesses can create customized dashboards using desired metrics from a plethora of metrics that we provide, to report more accurately.
Perform decisions using analytics and reports. CRM helps you visualize more and allows for 1000+ data interpretation formats – histogram, graph, pie-chart, bar graph, and others.
4. Give timely training to agents
Since we are living in changing times that come with a paradigm shift in consumer behavior, it has become more than necessary to upskill and provide constant training to helpdesk agents to keep up with the change and demands.
Empower your workforce with the right resources and tools they need to excel at their job.
A Knowledge Management System (KMS) is a knowledge repository associated with a CRM solution that helps avail relevant information, updates, and knowledge as required. This mega-information structure can be utilized to design training programs, quizzes, and solutions for the agents. KMS also makes it easier to monitor agent performance and provide constructive feedback.
5. Personalize customer interactions
Get into the habit of creating customer personas, which makes it so much simpler to deliver experiences that keep bringing customers back. Personalization helps retain customers for a lifetime. The lifestyle, demographics, pain points of each customer mapped accurately in the system can assist agents to fetch the required solution to queries in a minimal timeframe.
Agents and customers, therefore, engage in personalized conversations which actually lead to final results and closures.
Companies that excel at the customer experience drive revenues 4% to 8% higher than those of their market.
Source: Bain
6. Harness Artificial Intelligence
Intelligence is so fake that you have to use it, no matter what! AI has been a total game-changer for many businesses in providing proactive support, especially in regard to repeat queries and FAQs. It learns from the repetitive and designates appropriate solutions accordingly, saving manpower and resources. So, you may have a small team that does more in the most productive way.
Over 60% of US consumers prefer an automated self-service, such as a website or mobile app, for simple customer service tasks.
7. Create and stick to a customer-centric culture
Yet another aspect of a good customer service strategy entails the employee centricity of your brand. A customer-centric culture that is external can only be built from the inside, i.e., when you create a domestic ambiance that understands the business’s CS strategies, in and out, across departments and people.
Communication to the internal employees should be consistent so that everyone is aware of the latest upgrades, features, and other details.
8. Resolve on a centralized platform
What better than resolving tickets, incoming from varied sources, on a unified platform that requires agents to sign in only once! Stay in touch with the CRM and customer service tips at every touchpoint in their journey and centralize interactions and conversations from every channel possible – Social Media, SMS, Email, Call, Live chat, and others.
9. Empower the use of self-serve portals
Self-serve is self-love! Empower and guide your customers to resolve issues on their own without any agent intervention. The self-serve portals automate responses to repeat queries and save on agent allocation. In fact, as per a publication, 68% of customers in today’s world prefer using self-serve.
Further, as of 2021, Kapture has introduced self-serve for the agents as well. We now have an Agent Assistant window on the dashboard that the agent can take to if stuck with a query.
Self-serve portals function on the basis of predetermined workflows, which are customized.
77% of consumers report having used a self-service support portal.
10. Learn from productive feedback
Garnering feedback and continually learning from it is the fundamental way of learning and improvising. A business can evaluate feedback through the NPS (net promoter score) feedback mechanism inbuilt with the CRM solution.
A ‘happy’ response to – “How likely are you to recommend this product/service to others?”- can measure customer loyalty whilst predicting business growth.
A delighted customer will be eager to recommend your product/service to so many other people, and you don’t want to miss this!
And that brings us to the end of delving into some fantabulous customer satisfaction tips which, if incorporated in the support regime, can bless you with more productivity and profitability.
We wish you prominent CSAT goals along with massive first-call resolutions at every stage of your business. Get resolving. Get closer to your customers!