Day: July 15, 2019

Categories
Customer Support

6 Ways to Make Every Interaction With Customers Fantastic

:”Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement”
-By James Cash Penney

Your customers today have high expectations — and if your business can’t meet them, they’re going to leave you for your competitors.
If that sounds harsh, well, it is. In addition to getting a product or service that works for them, they want to buy from companies that make it easy to get help when they need it, that go above and beyond for them, and that makes them proud to support their corporate culture and philosophy.

6 Ways to Make Every Interaction With Customers Fantastic

  1. Show empathy and gratitude
    Are you familiar with the golden rule? “Treat others as you want to be treated.”
    It might sound simple, but making sure each and every one of your customer interactions demonstrate your empathy for your customers’ struggles, and your gratitude for their loyalty, goes a long way.
    Customers are more likely to spend more and be loyal, longer if they have a history of positive experiences with your company. Do your part to make each sign-off positive and gracious to make your customers feel good about working with you.
  2. Be conscientious
    It’s of utmost importance to be conscientious and to responsibly follow-up to every customer communication you engage in with a solution, a forum for feedback, or helpful educational resources they can benefit from.
    Do research to investigate when your customers typically encounter issues with your product and reach out proactively with educational communications to try to prevent that friction in the first place.
  3. Be transparent and communicative
    It’s extremely important to be transparent when you communicate with your customers — especially if it’s about a mistake or error caused by you or your product.
    Using your empathy and gratitude muscles, don’t hesitate to explain the situation, apologise for the issue, and communicate how it happened — and how it won’t happen again. If it could happen again, be clear on that so your customer can prepare for the future.
  4. Ask for and act on customer feedback
    You can’t just give the term “valued customer” lip service — you need to walk the walk by regularly asking for and acting on customer feedback.
    Regularly asking customers for feedback via surveys is an effective way to identify potential problems before they cause your customers to churn.
  5. Go where your customers are
    It’s your job to make it as easy and painless as possible for your customers to get the answers they need to use your product or service. To do that, you should have a plan in place for providing service across a variety of channels where your customers typically reach out to you.
    Strive to always respond to customer requests and issues on the same platform where they originally reached out.
  6. Talk like a human
    Our final suggestion to make your customers love reaching out to you — even in cases of problems — is to talk like a human.
    Your customers aren’t looking for scripted corporate-speak when they call or write to you in need of assistance. Particularly if you’re communicating with customers on social media, scripted, formal language can ring hollow and insincere.
    If you’re in the middle of solving a customer issue, feel free to keep language professional. But once you’ve solved a customer’s problem, or if a customer is reaching out to share positive feedback, feel free to be less scripted, and more yourself.
Categories
Customer Support

5 Simple Strategies to Reduce Customer Effort for better customer experience

:“Choose to deliver amazing service to your customers. You’ll stand out because they don’t get it anywhere else.”
–Kevin Stirtz

We already know that the secret for organizations to increase customer loyalty is by improving the customer experience by focusing on the way customers feel. A key factor in doing so is reducing the amount of effort required by customers to receive the service they expect which will lead to improved customer experience and increased customer loyalty, and, as a result, to a higher ROI.
How can this be achieved? Take a look at our 5 strategies:-

5 Simple Strategies to Reduce Customer Effort

  1. Lead customers to low-effort resolution paths by promoting self-service “stickiness”
    Building on customers’ “stickiness” to self-service channels is a very effective way to reduce customer effort, providing the channel’s ability to fully resolve customer issues. This is especially true when customers prefer self-service but switch to the phone channel after finding unclear information, not finding the answer or feeling unsure of the answer, or experiencing technical failures.
  2. Be proactive and work on preventing the next issue
    Metrics such as First Call Resolution (FCR) can be insufficient when trying to resolving the customer’s stated issues. Full resolution only happens when the implicit issues that go beyond the stated needs of the customer are also resolved to reduce both effort and cost. Implicit issues, which might be overlooked during an initial first phone interaction, most often are logically related to the customer’s explicitly stated problem and frequently lead to repeat customer contact when not proactively taken care of.
  3. Enable agents with “experience engineering” to guide customer interactions
    Customer effort is more about how customers feel during service interactions than what they do in them. It is the customer’s interpretation of the interaction, also called the “feel factor,” that contributes most to customer loyalty. The strategy, therefore, should be to actively guide customer interactions by anticipating emotional responses and offering solutions proactively to create a mutually beneficial outcome through the resolution.
  4. Enable frontline staff to deliver low-effort experiences
    Organizations must create an environment that encourages frontline staff to take control of customer interactions in order to deliver a low-effort customer experience. Beyond agents’ IQ, and supporting their EQ, it is the Control Quotient (CQ) that provides the largest boost to performance and is a vital attribute for assuring low-effort interactions.
  5. Proactively solicit and listen to customer feedback on high-effort experiences
    The real transition to a customer-oriented service organization happens only when enterprises implement corrective actions and improvements based on feedback they receive from customers following high-effort interactions. Companies can get to the root cause by proactively seeking feedback from frustrated customers who have had a high-effort experience.