For small businesses, with limited time and resources, customer satisfaction is even more important. The U. Not to mention that happy customers and word of mouth can also be some of the most effective drivers for new business. Find opportunities to cross-sell and upsell. Your current customers can be one of your best sources of business. When you connect all of your support channels and the apps you use to run your business, like a customer relationship management CRM app, everyone at your company can be in the know about customers.
Support agents can see order histories, open opportunities, and shipping status. Sales knows when a customer needs help. When you share customer information, product insights, and support metrics across the company, not only can everyone be more productive and do a better job of building relationships, but you can uncover opportunities to cross-sell and upsell customers. Improve the products and services you offer.
Unlike product management or marketing teams — which only talk to customers from time to time — your agents talk to real customers every single day. A good customer service application coupled with a CRM system will gather information from a huge variety of sources across your business and beyond.
If you categorize your cases carefully, you can see what modifications and features customers would like to see in your product or what the biggest pain points are. These customer service insights are crucial in driving the most critically important product decisions. Make better business decisions.
Your customer service tools can help you do more than just support customers. From pre-purchase, through their purchase and all the way to their post-purchase experience. Here are three questions that will help you figure out how to provide better customer support in your business.
Can you quickly provide accurate answers to your customer questions? Are your support reps highly educated about your product offering? Is it easy to submit an order to your business? Are you able to accommodate custom requests? Can you efficiently solve errors with orders? Can you provide the customer with order details such as package tracking?
Are you able to quickly and easily fix any issues with faulty products or errors in service? How do you make it up to the customer in such cases? Are you educating your customers on how to get the most value out of your product or service? How easy is it for your customer to send in something for repair? Are you rewarding your customers for their loyalty and repeat business?
As you can see, good customer service is an easy yet complex subject. Plus, it varies from industry to industry. What might be considered a good customer service practice in one industry, might not be helpful in another.
Now, on to the meat and potatoes, why is good customer service so important anyway? Like we mentioned earlier, a good product or service can only get you so far. And, their positive testimonials will be more effective than any of your current marketing efforts — and cheaper, too.
Aside from that, let's look at some data-backed reasons why you should invest in your customer service team. According to our research team , the customer acquisition cost CAC — how much it costs to acquire a new customer — is more for a company that doesn't invest a small percentage of its budget in customer service.
Ultimately, investing in customer service can decrease your churn rate, which decreases the amount you must spend on acquiring new customers and decreases the overall CAC. You may have an idea of what your brand represents. However, your customers can't get into your head and they'll make assumptions based on your social media presence, advertisements, content, and other external marketing. Your customer service team, however, is where you have more control over this perception. These individuals speak directly to your customers and they have the responsibility of representing your brand when interacting with current or potential buyers.
Without your customer service team, you have no means of direct communication. Due to this, your customer service team is essential in relaying to customers what you want your brand image to be. They can help influence customers and convince them of your strengths over competitors.
No employee is going to enjoy coming into work if they feel under-appreciated compared to employees on other teams. The same goes for your customer service team.
However, their reasoning behind serving customers is less about wanting to provide quality service. Instead, it's about maintaining their professionalism and integrity, not wanting to get fired before quitting, being empathetic to customers, but getting recognition from them in the end.
Therefore, if you want your customers to do their best work, they should feel respected and appreciated. Only then will they find intrinsic motivation for doing a good job and serving their customers the right way, which will lead to your customers also feeling more respected and appreciated. And, when your customers are happier, they're more likely to spread the goodness to friends, family, and coworkers.
Think about it: if you have a stunning experience with a brand, you're probably going to rave about it to your friends over dinner later that night. It's natural; you want your close ones to commit to a brand that you trust. It's a chain reaction. If you have a happier customer service team, they'll work harder to satisfy and exceed the expectations of your customers.
Then, those customers will be extremely happy with your brand and refer others to it. Your customers can be your best — and cheapest — form of word-of-mouth advertising, as long as you give them a reason to do so. As said before, it's a lot cheaper to retain an old customer than to acquire a new one. In this sense, the higher a customer's lifetime value — the total revenue a company can expect a single customer to generate over the course of their relationship with that company — the higher the profit for your company.
Image Source. In comparison to, possibly, hundreds of competitors with similar products and services, your company has to do more than relish in the exciting features of your products. By providing stellar customer service, you can differentiate your company to your customers.
Loyalty is rooted in trust, and customers can trust real-life humans more than the ideas and values of a brand. So, by interacting with your customer service team, those customers can build, hopefully, life-long relationships with your business.
Clearly, customer service matters so much to customers that they would literally pay more to interact with a brand that does it well. These are statistics that can't be ignored. In an era where companies are learning to prioritize customer service, any company that doesn't do so will crash and burn. Customers are influenced by even a single experience; one positive experience could be the deciding factor for them to stick to a brand, whereas one negative one could send them running to a competitor.
For instance, if you work for an athletic wear company, you might associate your brand with fitness, health and wellness, and people who play sports.
However, your customers may purchase from you because they associate your brand with leisure, comfort, and attractiveness. So, you should align your marketing with those values as well.
Your customer service team can answer a lot of these probing questions for you. Rather than having to spend time and money on constantly surveying customers, you can have your customer service employees simply ask these questions while interacting with customers.
Their response can give you a lot of insights into improving your products, marketing, goals, and employee training. And, the more you improve the customer experience, the harder your employees will work. If you're running a business, customer lifetime value CLV is a pretty important metric. It represents the total revenue you can expect from a single customer account. Investing in your customer service offer is an excellent way to improve customer lifetime value.
0コメント