Areas of customer service you need to dominate
The top 7 areas of customer service you need to dominate
- Product quality and value for money
- Speed and efficiency
- Proactive service
- Reliability, responsiveness, and technique
- Multi-channel approach
- Customer retention and satisfaction
- Conflict resolution
Did you know that customers are likely to spend 31 per cent more on products or businesses with excellent reviews? As competition gets tighter and tougher, it’s really getting difficult for a brand to stand out.
However, excellent quality service continues to affect how a business is portrayed and how a customer sees it. Excellent customer service is a proper investment that can make or break your brand.
Customer service is the heart of a business. Choosing who or what company would represent your business in this department is a critical decision.
Hiring a customer service team
In the past several years, more and more businesses have joined the trend and outsourced their customer service departments.
After all, these outsourced customer service companies provide the expertise and experience in the matter for your business while you save up to 70 per cent on employment costs.
Achieving excellent customer service
A business’s goal is always to continuously improve and innovate to adapt to its customers’ growing needs and wants – and that includes the quality of its customer service.
In this age when a business has to remain online visibility through multiple channels like websites, review sites, and its social media channels, as well as maintain its more traditional customer service like phone calls and emails, it may be hard to keep up.
We need to learn the areas of customer service businesses need to master and dominate.
Offering excellent customer service consistently during each customer service interaction, and all throughout each customer journey can help boost your customer loyalty.
What are the areas of customer service businesses need to dominate?
Customer service isn’t just about being friendly to potential customers, responding to calls, and providing relevant information. It is so much more than that.
Customer service has multiple areas that you need to master in order to create a more fruitful and substantial bond with your customers.
1. Product quality and value for money
Offering products and services at their utmost quality with value for money is one of the customer service areas that most people do not know of. The quality of your products and services speak for themselves.
When you get that right, it will make all the difference as it is a massive chunk of one less thing to worry about.
2. Speed and efficiency of customer service reps
Excellent products may be your main selling point, but exceeding your customers’ expectations when it comes to speed and efficiency will make the business stand out.
Additionally, speed and efficiency when it comes to responding to complaints, answering customer inquiries, and providing solutions is one area of customer service that needs to be mastered.
Your customer service professionals should be able to deliver great customer service support through various communication channels.
Hire a customer service representative with -problem-solving, excellent phone support and live chat support, and time management skills.
3. Good customer service is a proactive service
It is probably one of the overlooked areas of customer service, but just as important. Every customer service team should huddle up during, say, monthly meetings.
Think about how you can provide an even better customer experience during customer interactions in a timely manner. Thinking ahead can definitely save the company the trouble of future angry customers, profit loss, and most especially, poor customer service.
Think of yourselves in the position of the customer, and come up with ways to make their experience better. You can even gamify it if you want, or make the activity as creative as you can.
It’s team-building and coming up with proactive support in one.
4. Reliability, responsiveness, and technique
A customer service team has to be reliable, responsive, and armed with excellent communication techniques. When someone reaches out for customer support, they’re expecting that their concerns will be attended to as soon as possible.
In fact, research conducted by The Social Habit found that 32% of customers who have attempted to contact a brand, product, or company through social media for customer support expect a response within 30 minutes.
Further, 42% of the respondents expect a response within the hour.
An unreliable and unresponsive customer service (no matter what channel) will most likely result in customer and profit loss. Customers need to feel appreciated, and a competent, reliable, and responsive customer service team can show that.
5. Multi-channel approach
In this day and age, you truly cannot ignore the power of the internet and social media. You may have impeccable phone customer service, but it wouldn’t matter as much if 50 per cent of your customers are complaining on social media.
One negative review could affect your business in more ways than one, so having an effective multi-channel approach to customer service is necessary.
Different service channels have different strengths and weaknesses, and that’s why it’s essential to learn all of them. Study your market, give importance to the channels that they use, but never forget the power of having a multi-channel approach to instill that your company has terrific customer service.
Whether you use a client portal, social media, or other communication channels, make sure to understand their unique advantages and limitations.
6. Customer retention and satisfaction
Losing customers means losing money, and it’s the last thing we would want for a business. Quality customer service providers play a significant role in customer retention and satisfaction.
Happy and satisfied customers can do a lot for your business without you even knowing. It can be buying more of your products to deliver word-of-mouth advertising to their friends, family, and neighbors.
A customer service provider’s job in this scenario is to ensure that the clients are receiving the quality of customer service that they deserve. It also wouldn’t hurt to go the extra mile for these customers.
Happy customers mean happy business.
7. Conflict resolution
How a team handles and responds to conflict says a lot about the company’s values and policies. Whether it’s the customer complaining about your product, service or your staff, the customer service team should know how to handle unfortunate situations like this.
An effective way to manage conflicts and irate customers is to allow them to express their feelings and offer emphatic support. Show you care and use the correct tone and words in communicating your response.
Try to find something to agree with them about, then work your way up from there. Have a streamlined process of dealing with conflict – you’ll thank yourself later.
Why you should learn about the areas of customer service
Businesses rely on their customers for good feedback and word of mouth advertising, which will then directly impact the company’s profits and growth.
They realize that customer satisfaction should be of utmost priority, and that it plays a major role in keeping the business alive.
Customer service cannot be mastered in a day. It has become a quite complicated part of the business that needs continuous innovation. Further, learning about the areas of customer service that you need to master is a good starting point.
Another option is to reach out to an outsourcing company — like Helpware — that can provide you with a reliable customer service team to assist your clients.
Good luck!
Independent
