Today customer expectations are acting proportionately with the technological advances. If your customer support is unable to answer the drastic changes in the industry, your competitor’s certainly will.
Does not matter if there is an advanced ticketing system employed to eliminate the frustrations of time-consuming agent re-routing process or an automated system that helps the customer in navigating on his/her own to clear their queries, it is time businesses need to incorporate the following workarounds in order to elevate the performance of their customer support team.
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Iconize your customer support as an organization-wide value
A good customer service isn’t only about answering the queries of a customer on call, but certainly, there is much more to that.
Besides the customer support personnel, even employees from different departments should recognize and acknowledge the significance of customer-oriented or ‘people’ skills.
The attitude and tone used over the phone or live chat with your customers should also be employed in the advertising team devising marketing strategies and messages, general email correspondence and the behavior portrayed to your targeted audience over any medium.
It’s about building an environment that reciprocates with what customers want in their interaction and engagement with the brand and the company. This facilitates in creating an atmosphere where a great customer service team can work and flourish together with the aim of providing unmatched support services to customers in an empathetic and open-minded way.
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Spread consistent messaging throughout the company
Whether you run a startup or an established enterprise, knowledge sharing activities with the purpose of keeping everyone onboard well-informed is not as easy as it sounds. Sometimes even experienced organizations tend to struggle in this regard.
Small and large companies have their own reasons to experience intra-company communication hurdles due to a number of factors including size, bureaucracy, etc.
To cater the issues, you need to draft the important documentation that needs to be distributed. Companies that trust their internal knowledge and promote self-service solutions find it much easier to adapt and distribute content.
This will also provide your customer support employees the opportunity to acquire spot training.
Rather than giving your customers the chance to complain about receiving contradicting messages from different agents, the brand message should be uniform and clear from all the agents in the customer support team.
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Eliminate anonymity from the team
Even though there are times and jobs were fake profiles and personas are used in an organization, but a great customer support team realizes the importance of having a real personal connection.
The better the online chat agents are at communicating on a much deeper and emotional level, the safer and comfortable the customers are going to feel taking their concerns and queries.
The same approach must be undertaken by personnel who act as the face of the company, namely, digital marketers, sales people, operations managers, etc.
Such professionals are able to display the best image of the company and build customer trust through social media platforms. A great communication always originates when there is a healthy person to person (P2P) communication.
Talk to your customers as much humanely and professionally as possible in order to acquire customer trust and loyalty.
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Availability and accessibility at all times
Yes, the customer support team must be ever-available for their customers. If not in the literal sense, but you do not want your customers impatiently waiting for their issues to be answered, not to mention them deciding to quit your business and seek for a much better people-centric alternate.
It is obvious, any customer regardless of the industry would like them to be heard and acknowledged in a quick and prompt manner. Consider the following statistics:
- Around 33% of customers would second a brand to others that offer a swift but ineffectual response.
- On the other hand, about 17% of customers would prefer a product/service that provides a slow benefit but proves to be a powerful problem-solver.
- 53% of customers on Twitter who have a question regarding a product expect a reliable response within an hour, while in the case of registering a complaint, the number jumps to 72%.
The fact is speed isn’t the only big thing significant for customers, but the heavy traffic on social media, search engines, online product review articles, and forums have enabled the customers in acquiring the exact information needed to make patient and educated purchases.
So it is evidently vital for businesses to include feedback or two-way communication options from all digital mediums and devices if they are to provide an exceptional customer service.
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An accessible knowledge
It’s simple, never make your customers puff and sweat in order to get the information they want. Even though FAQs are important, standard, and a top-notch weapon in the arsenal of the customer support team, but still that too is never enough.
Let’s not forget today the global customer base is impatient enough and expects their concerns to be answered without needing to write an email to the agent, open a live chat pop-up window, or make a call to the company’s customer support department.
Consider the example of a customer who is in the middle of purchasing a product but instantly feels the need to acquire additional details in order to genuinely think his/her decision of purchasing is worthwhile.
As per a study conducted by Forrester, about 45% of customers will quit their online purchasing if they are unable to find a satisfactory answer to their burning questions.
To serve the purpose appropriately, a FAQ solutions page must be creative and diverse rather than be restricted to a single page of the website.