Your work is greatly affected (for better or worse) by customer service. A great experience can lead to repeat business and lifetime customers. A poor experience can lead to dissatisfied customers, lost business, and even bad press.
The Importance of Providing Good Customer Service
Despite the importance of customer service, many companies struggle to get it right. At its core, customer service is the role dedicated to helping customers obtain the value they paid for from a product or service, especially when problems arise. Many companies have a dedicated customer service department, but those that invest in providing great experiences make support a priority for the entire company.
Transforming Customer Service into a Revenue Driver
In the past, customer service was important for companies that had a strong financial incentive to retain their customers, but the standards have risen across all industries, and customers reward companies that keep up with the evolution. This shift has turned support into a revenue driver. According to the American Express Customer Service Barometer: 50% of consumers in the United States have abandoned a purchase due to a bad service experience. 7 out of 10 shoppers say they would spend more money (17% on average) with companies that consistently provide great customer service. 33% of customers say they would switch to a competitor after one bad service experience.
The Importance of Customer Support Experience
One of the most critical touchpoints you have on the customer journey map is the support experience the customer faces, so your service must be exceptional. In this guide, we will cover everything you need to know about how to provide customer service, improve customer retention, and avoid common mistakes in providing poor customer service.
Choosing the Right Customer Service Channels
The channels you choose determine the level and types of customer service you can provide.
1. Email: Providing Quick, Asynchronous Support
Managing email is easier than live support channels that require you or one of your team members to be available around the clock. Email also allows you to set reasonable response expectations, which is a significant benefit for business owners juggling many things. A note on your contact page can inform customers to expect a reply within a few hours or that email support is unavailable on weekends. Providing excellent customer service often relies on showing your care for your customers and users. Setting expectations can help ensure that customers understand your customer service process and that they do not have mismatched expectations.
2. Social Media: Public Customer Support
Social media support differs from other available channels mainly in that responses are typically public and visible to anyone who wants to see them. New customers often look to a brand’s social media to determine what type of company they are dealing with and whether they take customer service seriously. Every interaction with customers on social media is an opportunity to show who you are and can be crucial in building or destroying a potential relationship with anyone who happens upon the conversation. While social media tends to highlight negative interactions, satisfied customers can also write positive reviews about their experiences, enhancing your reputation.
3. Live Chat: Solving Customer Issues in Real Time
Live chat is an excellent way to provide quick and easily accessible support for current and potential customers. When considering offering live chat, think about which pages you want customers to be able to access (such as high-priority pages in your store) and what you hope to achieve through it. You may want to invite potential customers who are browsing but have not completed their orders to start a live chat conversation, or enable live chat for customers who have just purchased a product but may have a question or problem. New customers can also use your live chat feature to learn more about a specific product (such as size or shipping), allowing them to leave the interaction confident in their choice to go with your brand.
4.
Phone Support: Providing a Direct Line for Your Business
Many customers prefer to call for help with urgent issues that require timely attention, especially if they have a problem with a high-value product. Remember that offering phone support is not necessary for all types of businesses, but if your target audience values the ability to contact your business by phone, it may be wise to implement phone support in your organization. Set up a phone line that customers can call directly or leave a voicemail. Small businesses aren’t expected to be available 24/7, so post your availability on your website, along with the duration customers can expect for voicemail responses. You can even go a step further and set up a VIP phone number for your most loyal customers.
5. Helpful Content: Providing Your Customers with Answers
Reduce support inquiries by creating a FAQ page or instant answers, or by providing other documentation that shares your core policies and answers common customer questions. Providing this information to customers and making it easily accessible gives them the option to serve themselves and saves you valuable time. Your support content should grow and change as your store evolves and new products are added. Regularly review your FAQ page and ensure that it is up to date.
Essential Tips for Improving Customer Service
1. Know Your Product Well
Nothing frustrates customers more than asking a question and getting an incorrect or incomplete answer. It doesn’t matter if you offer a wide range of products, run a drop shipping business, or are new to your product category. Not knowing your products is like a singer forgetting the lyrics while performing on stage.
2. Learn to Use Positive Language
Being positive doesn’t mean you should limit yourself to a bubbly and cheerful tone. Instead, it’s about avoiding negative phrases that can lead customers to react negatively. Positive language focuses on solutions, not problems, and gives people a sense of empowerment. For example, you can turn negative phrases into positive ones by making a few simple changes. Instead of saying “you have to” or “I need you to,” you can say “let’s first check your order number” or “thank you! It looks like this product will be available next month. I can place an order for you as soon as it arrives at our warehouse.”
3. Adjust Your Tone According to Context
There are two important concepts in business communication: voice and tone. Essentially, voice is the overarching style you want your brand to convey, while tone is the appropriate style for a specific context. A playful dog brand may want to mimic the enthusiasm their customers feel for their furry friends. However, responding in that voice without adjusting your tone to an email about a delayed shipment or a damaged order might be inappropriate. While your brand’s voice should generally remain consistent, you may want to align your tone with that of customers who have a different conversational style.
4. Clear and Transparent Writing Skills
One of the biggest reasons for ineffective communication is clever writing at the expense of clarity. Creativity is an important part of making the support experience stand out, but the top priority is writing clearly and directly so that answers cannot be misinterpreted. It’s easy to assume that everyone knows what you know, which is an unintended bias known as the curse of knowledge. To avoid this mistake, treat customers as qualified individuals, but don’t assume anything about what they know. Great support starts with writing clear and direct answers that cannot cause confusion.
5.
Defending Your Clients
Companies expect to have empathy for their clients. But empathy is only the first passive step in the equation. More important than empathy is defense. Defense works because it is easy to identify and understand – clients feel it through action and describe attempts. Customer interactions consist of three stages: Sensing: This happens at the beginning of the conversation when you ask questions to determine the cause of the client’s issue. Research: After identifying the problem, you explore what can be done practically to resolve that issue. Settlement: Once solutions emerge, you can work with the client to make the appropriate decision.
6. Creativity in Providing Amazing Moments
Amazing “moments” rely on creativity rather than the monetary value of the client, but they create lasting loyalty through the care taken in thinking about the moment. Clients are attracted to freebies, but free items alone do not make them loyal. Amazing moments rely on creativity rather than capital. Here are some examples: sending handwritten thank-you notes, including creative fill-in entries, providing samples that complement the purchase, offering surprise discounts after a purchase, and creating personal connections with short videos.
7. Understanding How to Set the Right Expectations
Setting the right expectations can directly affect how clients perceive the quality of your support and make the difference between whether they will be satisfied or dissatisfied. Even small details make a difference: if your chat tool says “get an instant answer” and the actual response time is three minutes, clients will end up frustrated for reasons you could avoid. The golden rule is to under-promise and over-deliver, which is easier said than done. There will be times when you feel internal pressure to make unrealistic promises, such as when you are not exactly sure when an item will be back in stock, or if something went wrong with the order and you want to compensate the client. Big promises that you find difficult to fulfill, or even exceed, can raise client expectations.
Why Improving Customer Service Enhances Customer Experience
Customer service should be more than a necessary expense for doing business. It should create value.
1. Analyze Root Causes
Customer service creates value by uncovering hidden issues through feedback provided voluntarily. This information can help you prevent problems for future clients by addressing the root cause of the issue, rather than just dealing with its symptoms. For example, if you receive the same question about a product several times a day, you might want to rephrase the description of that product on your webpage, creating a better and more informative experience for future clients – and saving time that you would have spent answering those specific questions. Solve the root cause of the client’s problem, and do not address the resulting symptoms.
2. Encourage More Valuable Conversations
You cannot provide a special treatment for every client during a support interaction; this cannot be sustainable. Without improving efficiency, some clients may have a good experience at the expense of others. Bill Price, former Global Vice President of Customer Service at Amazon, understands this problem directly. The only way to improve client satisfaction is to understand the types of conversations you are having and the types of conversations you should (or can) have with clients. Price and his fellow consultant David Jaffe share how they approach this opportunity in their book “The Best Service is No Service.”
3. Provide Unexpected Insights
Education is at the core of excellent customer service: education for your clients and education for you. Clients will call you with questions and problems that you won’t be able to uncover on your own. Constructive education is a gift because it helps you discover opportunities that can enhance client value in the long run and change your entire business.
How to
Dealing with Difficult Scenarios in Customer Service
Listening to angry customers can be one of the most difficult aspects of managing your own business. It can be easy to take their dissatisfaction personally, even if you know there’s nothing different you could have done. It’s hard to avoid mistakes entirely, but the upside is that they often provide an opportunity to demonstrate your commitment to earning new customers. If you can recover from a mistake, the customer may end up being more loyal than if the mistake hadn’t happened at all. This is known as “service recovery,” a term coined by Sundar Bharadwaj and Michael McCollough.
1. Anticipate Potential Problems Ahead of Time
Some issues will occur more frequently than others. For example, most merchants will be familiar with customers asking why their order hasn’t arrived. It’s worth creating a template to respond to such inquiries. Try to identify frequently asked questions in advance so that you’re prepared for them during busy sales periods. Once you have a solid response that fits your brand, you can save it as a template for future use.
2. Knowing How to End a Customer Conversation
Often, you’ll receive
Source: https://www.shopify.com/blog/customer-service
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