Day: July 19, 2019

Categories
Customer Support

Your Customers Want to Self-Serve — It’s Good For Them And Good For You

“A self-service solution doesn’t mean you don’t offer customer service.On the contrary, self-service is a way to enhance”
– Shep Hyken

Customer service organizations have to make self-service easy and effective. It must connect the customer to the right answer or resolution.
Self-service should be delivered when the customer is engaged, with a full understanding of their context and in the flow of their actions within the application that they are using.
Self-service interactions should seamlessly transfer to an agent. If this happens, the agent should have a full visibility of the customer journey so that they don’t have to repeat any of the information that has already been communicated.
Self-service should also empower customers with knowledge that they are anticipated to need, ensuring success in their journey.
Below are the advantages of Self-Service:

Your Customers Want to Self-Serve — It’s Good For Them And Good For You

  1. Impacts the speed of issue resolution and customer satisfaction
    Self-service delivers personalized engagement, increases customer satisfaction and reduces operational costs by deflecting common customer inquiries.
  2. Increases conversion and revenue
    Proactive content, delivered at the right time in a journey, helps educate the customer.
    It gives them confidence that they are making the right purchase. This decreases buyer’s remorse, which ultimately decreases returns.
  3. Drives customer engagement
    Self-service content can help onboard customers. It can help increase product education, including new features, deepening the success that customers have with their purchases.
    This means that great customer self-service delivers much more than just call deflection. If done properly, it allows you to digitally engage with your customers to empower them with answers and advice that deepen their engagement with the brand — positively influencing their satisfaction, retention, and advocacy.
  4. Creates lasting customer success
    The best forward-facing employees in your company will work on having a deep knowledge of how your product works. Without knowing your product from front to back, you won’t know how to help customers when they run into problems.
Categories
Customer Support

When customer is Angry

At some moments customer service job can be a challenge. Dealing with different people and trying to meet their expectations is not an easy task. It takes patience, sharp intellect and I would even say wisdom to navigate through the various customer moods and still provide a professional service.There is a long list of advice spoken on this subject. And the reason is that it’s really not easy. Key is “Remain calm yourself”.

When customer is Angry

    1. Solution:
    1. A customer can burst out of anger but it is your job to find the right possible solution and provide satisfying service and help is provided in order to find the right solution. Ignorance is not at all bliss here. And, a fistfight on the phone/e-mail is a strict No-No, while getting too much defensive without providing any real solution is also a mistake. You can take a leaf from Disney’s book, as they have developed and harnessed the effective HEARD Technique.
    1. HEARD:
    1. Hear
      Let the customer tell their entire story without interruption.
      Sometimes, we just want someone to listen.
    2. Empathize
      Convey that you deeply understand how the customer feels.
      Use phrases like “I’d be frustrated, too.”
    3. Apologize
      As long as it’s sincere, you can’t apologize enough.
      Even if you didn’t do whatever made them upset, you can still genuinely be
      apologetic for the way your customer feels.
      (E.g., I’m always sorry that a customer feels upset).
    4. Resolve
      Resolved the issue quickly, or make sure that your employees are
      empowered to do so. Don’t be afraid to ask the customer:
      “what can I do to make this right?”
    5. Diagnose
      Get to the bottom of why the issue occurred, without blaming
      anyone; focus on fixing the process so that it doesn’t happen again.

When you’re faced with an angry customer, simply follow this checklist. Try and hear (or read) what the customer is truly upset about, without interrupting them. Express empathy and show them that you understand their frustration. Offer a heartfelt apology, even if you did nothing wrong. Do whatever it takes to resolve the issue, without being afraid to ask the customer what they feel the best resolution would be.
If you run a customer support team, you will always endure angry and fuming clients. It is the law of nature and it is bound to happen to each and every executive in your team. The issue and the challenge here is how you can pacify and calm them down—and ultimately solve the problem to satisfy all concerned.

Categories
Customer Support

The New Definition of Customer Support

“We believe a customer service shouldn’t be just a department: It should be the entire company”
-By Tony Hseh,Ceo of Zappos

Customer support isn’t the same thing as customer service, although it employs customer service techniques.
And it’s not the same thing it was 50, 20, or even 5 years ago — the definition is still evolving.

The New Definition of Customer Support

To us and many other customer-driven companies, customer support means:
Timely, empathetic help that keeps the customer’s needs at the forefront of every interaction.
This is what informs our mission of helping you build a company people love. It’s why we train everyone at the company on customer support,why our support team has the power and authority to resolve issues as soon as they arise, why our customers’ customers, dont see anything but a normal email,and a hundred other decisions that inform a customer-driven approach to support.

 

Traditional Customer Service

The New Customer Support
Viewed as a cost center Viewed as the face of a company, a critical component of sales and word-of-mouth marketing
Disempowered agents who require managerial approval for tasks customers should be able to accomplish themselves Self-service first; skilled and empowered agents can help with more complex questions and requests
Requires customers to call during specified business hours and often wait on hold for help Round-the-clock help via multiple channels: documentation, email, phone, chat, social media, etc.
Call centers relegated to cubicles or outsourced to other locations/countries Works side-by-side with product teams, has a seat at the table in company decision-making
Dead-end job Myriad opportunities for growth and development
Operational metrics tied to cost-cutting: first response times, call resolution times, etc. Holistic metrics tied to company-wide goals:NPS,customer satisfaction etc.

The new customer support applies the principles of customer service in helping customers solve problems and make decisions, but in addition, functions as part sales, part tech support, and part customer success.
When 86% of customers quit doing business with a company due to bad customer experience,today’s subscription-model, customer-retention-oriented businesses need to approach every support interaction as an opportunity to acquire, retain or upsell as well.
In the self-service internet age, customers don’t need go-betweens to assist them with what should be simple functions, like canceling their account. And what’s more, people have grown to expect self-service — if you let them get to a point where they have to reach out, you’ve gotten in the way of usage and adoption.
“If the support team isn’t 100% embedded in the product you’re trying to market, support suffers,”
Customer-driven companies remove a lot of that friction by automating that which can be automated and freeing their most valuable resource — their team — to work on problems that can’t be automated away. Hence the shift away from hiring your average “people person,” toward hiring highly skilled, empathetic problem-solvers.