In the U.S., companies lose $62 billion a year solely because of poor customer service.
Customer service is the direct reflection of customer experience. And, the above stat alone is enough to encourage you to take the necessary actions to improve your customer experience. Companies can achieve a good customer experience only through great customer service skills and strategies. Improved customer service skills automatically mean improved customer relationships.
Customers remember the direct interaction they have with your company. Despite this, many companies overlook customer service. Lousy customer service can lead to customer loss regardless of how great your product or marketing strategies are.
The bottom line is that your customer service department is often the face of your business. And the skill and quality of the support define your customers’ experience. Businesses who understand this and pay attention to customer experience benefit from it compared to those who don’t. A competent company will continually be improving its strategies to serve its customers exactly the way they want.
Companies who’re agile to the market change and quickly adapt to the customer needs continue to maintain a stable relationship with their customers. If you are one of these companies looking to improve your customer service, you’ve come to the right place. Below are seven tips to provide top customer support and gain loyal customers:
1. Analyze Your Existing Support
The first step is analyzing what exactly you need to improve. You need a complete overview of your existing support, support agents’ skills, loopholes in your workflows, technological needs, and so on.
Survey and interview your customers to understand and evaluate your existing customer support. Send feedback forms to customers after their resolution has been met. It is a great way to see where your team’s skills do and don’t measure up.
A help desk tracking software helps you understand customer behavior and later helps you make data-driven decisions. With large-scale customer data metrics, you can gain actionable insights. This way, you can get a complete 360-degree view of your support performance.
You also need to align your support with the latest customer service trends. You need to be aware of the latest trends going on in the market. And then constantly update your support strategies accordingly.
Read More: Top 10 Customer Service Trends to Follow in 2021
2. Improve Your Customer Service Skills
Make sure that your customer service team is skilled enough to manage your customer needs. No amount of customer service software or helpdesks can compensate for the shortcomings in this area. Here are some skills that your customer service agents must have:
- Empathy, consistency, and patience
- Adaptability to different circumstances
- Ability to convey clear and straight-forward information
- Work ethic and customer-centric approach
- Adequate knowledge of the product and issues related to it
3. Look at Every Touchpoint
A bad customer experience through any channel or touchpoint in the customer lifecycle can ruin your relationship with the customer. Demonstrating the right skills are important. But doing so consistently is even more important. Pay more attention to the critical channels of communication.
You must have a full view of the customer experience from a single interface. You can ask your customers in one of your feedback forms. Besides this, you can analyze and find out what are all the channels that your customers prefer. Providing multiple channels also helps you reduce customer response time. And the faster you respond, the happier the customers.
4. Inculcate These Responding Techniques in Your Company Culture
Customers also expect you to respond to them as quickly as possible. The ideal time for the first response is usually less than 24 hours. The goal is to ensure that the customer feels understood, heard and their issues addressed. The ability to communicate adequately is a top job skill for customer service employees. Agents need to be clear and brief about the next steps that will help solve their issues.
Agents need to tell the customers that their issue is understood and acknowledged. This helps create a mutual understanding with the customers and helps establish a better customer relationship. It also makes it easier for both parties to receive the information they need.
One of the essential customer service techniques is to remain calm even when responding to an angry customer. The customer’s tone can be hard to decipher over live chat and text. Therefore, choosing your words carefully is an essential customer service technique as well. A good tone? Keep it as gentle and informative as possible regardless of the channel you’re using to interact with the customer.
5. Provide Self-Service to Your Customers
The biggest way you can improve your customer service is by implementing a self-service knowledge base. Most customers are looking for a quick solution to a simple issue. Going through the whole ticketing process for a simple issue would be a waste of time for agents and customers. Hence, a knowledge base comes into the picture.
Other self-service features involve live chatbots, FAQs, and so on. A well-articulated knowledge base or FAQs helps customers search for and resolve issues on their own. Chatbots can be used for instant and general queries. You can connect your knowledge base and FAQs with chatbots as well. This way, support teams will only have to focus on solving complicated issues that need 1:1 support.
You can select a helpdesk that lets you provide self-service from within or go for a separate helpdesk software as well. It reduces the number of customer calls.
For instance, by implementing DeskXpand helpdesk’s self-service features, Jonathan, a healthcare industry entrepreneur, reduced his customer support calls by 35%. Jonathan forecasted the problem of larger customer service requests even before he began his new venture. Read more about Jonathan’s journey with DeskXpand.
DeskXpand is an omnichannel help desk with extensive self-service and robust ticketing features. It helps you deliver a flexible and enhanced customer experience across all channels. So, do you want to achieve complete visibility and attain a high-resolution rate like Jonathan? Check out DeskXpand now!
6. Improve Your Company’s Customer Responsiveness
If your agents have a necessary skill set, that’s a good beginning. But, they still need to build relevance while addressing the queries. Their response should be contextual and at a satisfactory level. Here are some tips to ensure that your customer service is both thorough and well-received:
- Ask your agents to identify shared interests while dealing with customers. This makes conflict easier to overcome by giving a human touch to the relationship. It also endears customers to your agents and eventually your company.
- Make sure that your customers feel heard. Clarify and rephrase what customers say and ensure that you understand them and their needs.
- Admit the mistakes from your end, even if you discover them before your customers do. This builds trust and restores their confidence in you. It also allows you to control the situation and then resolve it.
- The journey doesn’t end once the resolution is met. You need to follow up after as well. You need to make sure that your customers are satisfied with the service. You can send them emails, feedback, surveys, etc., to find out.
Read More: 10 Ways to Improve Your Company’s Customer Responsiveness
7. Personalized Customer Service
Customers love to receive one-to-one experiences specially catered for them. Personalization can be attained through implementing a customer-centric culture in the company itself. The smallest of practices, such as checking the customer’s background before beginning a conversation with them, can help. If you can connect with them on a personal level, that customer is retained for life.
If you’re already not, you must also consider customization as an essential part of your support. It will enable you to connect with your targeted audience on a personal level. By customizing every inch of your website, helpdesk, or support apps, you can attain a cohesive brand identity.
Improve Your Service Desk with DeskXpand
We hope that the ways mentioned above will help you improve your overall customer service department and customer service skills. However, you can implement all these steps with the help of ideal helpdesk software. And what could be more intriguing than software enhanced with the latest ticketing features, extensive self-help features, and is robust to all customer support needs from small to large businesses. Yes, DeskXpand is an ideal choice for businesses.
DeskXpand is built by professional developers with 14+ years of development experience. We are an ISO27001 certified help desk development company. We build customized products according to your present and future needs.
