“Just having satisfied customers isn’t good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create raving fans.”
Most of us have had negative customer service experiences. Maybe it was an overly-assertive salesperson, long call hold times, or a support agent that was rude or totally disinterested in helping you resolve your issue. Sometimes these experiences can be so bad that we’re forever turned off from a brand as a whole! The truth is, the customer service you provide is the heart and soul of any successful business—It’s the very thing that keeps customers coming back again and again, and without customers, a business simply does not exist!
So with that in mind, here are QCSS’ Top 3 Qualities of Great Customer Service:
Empower Your Customer
According to Harvard Business Review, 81% of customers try to resolve their issue before contacting a customer support representative. A great way to empower your customer is to help them educate themselves with a product knowledge base and a support community where they can ask other consumers questions about their issues. Filing giant TurboTax exemplifies this wonderfully, with numerous help articles and their own dedicated community forum. Providing your customer with self-service community options is not only cost-effective for you, but is a petri dish for creating a raving consumer culture around your brand, too!
Be Timely
In a study performed by Forrester, 66% of people felt that respect for their time was the #1 most important factor in great customer service. This means that finding solutions quickly and effectively is the foundation of delighting your customer every time.
We don’t mean that people want to be rushed off the phone, though, but rather that it’s incredibly important to have speedy response times. Customers will spend the necessary time troubleshooting, but they don’t want to listen to entire libraries of call waiting music. Just make sure that your CSRs are plentiful, friendly, and knowledgeable, and you’ll be good to go.
Make Them Feel Valued
There are lots of ways to achieve this, but there’s one idea to keep in mind above all else: Your customer is just as human as you, your CSRs, or anyone else who works for you. Even more than that, your customer has paid you a portion of their livelihood, so you can make yours! So treat them like they’re the center of your world.
Ask yourself, what are some of the best customer service experiences you’ve had? How were you treated, that helped you feel surprised and delighted? These experiences are great frames of reference for how you can improve your customer support!
Customers want to feel like they are interacting with another human being, not a machine, so show them empathy and a sense of humor. Certainly, chatbots have their place, but they are no replacement for human interaction. Do your best to know who your customer is on an individual level—Sending individualized cards or birthday gifts are great ways to show how much you care.
