Date: November 19, 2020
Category: Blog
We all know that experience and the level of service is now high on the customer’s agenda, heavily influencing buying behaviours. Customers no longer compare your service against just your direct competitors- they also compare it against that of brands in other industries. With that being said, here are the top 3 steps you can take to improve your customers’ experience today…
Listen to your customers
This may sound a little obvious, but listening is the key to a great customer service experience.
Don’t think your customer won’t be able to tell if the Advisor is not listening to them properly. If the Customer Service Team aren’t listening to their customers properly, then they risk missing key details, or neglecting important actions.
But, if the Advisor is listening intently, they may pick up on subtle bites of information that they can use to improve the customer’s experience: The customer may have very briefly mentioned that they’re going on holiday- the Advisor can offer further assistance/take any actions for this and wish the customer a happy holiday at the end of the interaction!
And it’s not just frontline colleagues who need to pay attention to this tip. Your customer experience and marketing teams should be working together to ensure that they are harvesting relevant data and opinion from customers in order to inform product and service decisions- make sure what you’re offering is what your customer wants, or else they’ll look elsewhere.
Be genuine
Being genuine is incredibly important. If a customer feels that they’re being patronised, or -worse- humoured, then you risk losing them as a valued customer. Talk to your customer in a polite, honest, authentic and human way, and you can’t go much wrong.
Be sure to align all of your customer-facing (and internal-facing!) communications with this ethos, and be honest with your customer. In a social, big data-based World, and with so much competition, customers can be, understandably, cynical. Show them that your brand is genuine and can be trusted, with the customer always at the front and centre.
Empower your customer service team
To minimise the chance of your Customer Service Team making mistakes, you need to provide tip-top training.
Having a dedicated Training Team is the best way forward here. Be sure to maintain a consistent form of communication with your clients/campaigns to ensure that the training experience is tailor-made to their brand. Cross-skilling and up-skilling is not only good for the Advisors’ development, it also reduces the requirement for the customer to be transferred between different departments- a bugbear for any customer.
Furthermore, give them the skills, tools and processes they need to delight the customer (i.e. tutorials and product knowledge, gestures of goodwill, free delivery, etc.). Your highly skilled frontline customer service team will know what’s best for the customer upon each interaction; and if you empower them, not only do you improve the customers’ experience, but the team will feel more invested in the brand and feel a greater sense of job satisfaction. Happy customer service teams = happy customers!
Do you need help improving your customers’ experience? Simply get in touch.
