How To Deliver Amazing Customer Service
Customer service is a huge part of your business, but also a tricky area to get right. We can all deliver amazing customer service when dealing with regular people… but what about when the Customer From Hell comes in? If you’ve worked in any job facing down the public, you know the type, and they make your heart sink.
Still, we can only try to please everyone. With research showing that customer service is going to be a significant factor in brand perception by 2020, it’s important for all businesses to think about how they approach the customer service, and how they could improve it in the future.
Sometimes, it’s the most basic things. Do you have a VIP customer support that works 24/7? By that, I mean creating a soup to nuts customer experience that leaves them with a positive view of your brand, even if the journey isn’t 100% smooth. That means ensuring there are plenty of opportunities for customers to contact you, and plenty of reasons to come back with incentives and more.
A key to knowing how to deliver superior customer service is to get right into the core of your customer. Knowing their ‘persona’ can help you and any of your team to swiftly answer question and assist in solving problems the best way, simply because you have the psychological advantage of sending the right message at the right time to the right people. This is vital when things go wrong! All customers can and should understand that things can go wrong. How you handle the issue – and the customer – is really the only thing that matters. If you do so understanding them, you’ll get a lot further.
Social media is another way to build up a strong customer service relationship. It’s not just about understanding their behaviors and getting an idea of their persona. Its also about discovering where your customers prefer to communicate. In other words, we live in a world where there are multiple ways to communicate, and everyone has their preferred medium. Customers like it when you approach them in a way that makes them comfortable, and it also makes it a lot easier than hunting down your help desk.
So, what do you do when a customer is talking? You listen. It seems obvious, but many businesses surprisingly don’t listen. For example, you have a customer who is upset. They’re not happy about some element of your service, and they’re telling you in great depth about what a crappy experience it is that they’ve had.
Now, that’s hard to deal with, but the worst thing you can do is actually jump in. Just let them vent! For many people, just being allowed to fully air out their displeasure is enough to make them a lot happier before hanging up – while jumping in with an ‘actually’ could make things worse.
Most of all, remember to personalize the experience as much as possible while also being grateful. No business will succeed without customers, so they are, in a sense, your biggest assets. Little touches such as molding your website and communication to them can make a world of difference, and rewarding them for being customers also goes a long way.
It’s easy to forget – especially online – that there are real people on both ends of the experience, and that you’re not just talking to a robot or a screen. Show the customers your human side and succeed!