Your work is significantly impacted (either positively or negatively) by customer service. A fantastic experience can lead to repeat business and lifelong customers. Conversely, a poor experience can result in dissatisfied customers, loss of business, and even a bad reputation.
The Importance of Providing Good Customer Service
Despite the importance of customer service, many companies struggle to provide it correctly. At a basic level, customer service is the role dedicated to helping customers obtain the value they paid for from a product or service, especially when issues 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.
Improving Customer Experience
While excellent customer service is particularly important for companies with a strong financial incentive to retain their customers, the level of service has risen across all industries, and customers reward companies that keep up with this 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 will look to switch to a competitor after just one bad service experience.
One of the most important touchpoints you have on the customer journey map is the customer support experience, so your service must stand out. In this guide, we will cover everything you need to know about delivering customer service, improving customer retention, and avoiding common mistakes in delivering 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 Fast and Asynchronous Support
Email is easier to manage than live support channels, which require you or someone on your team to be available around the clock. Email also allows you to set reasonable response expectations, which is a significant benefit for business owners with limited time. A note on your contact page can inform customers that a response is expected within a few hours or that email support is unavailable on weekends. A record of your discussion is often automatically generated, allowing you to easily see how satisfied the customer is with their support experience, request feedback, and track conversations (we will look at that in detail later in this guide). One final benefit of email is its simplicity. There are many great tools that help your customer service team respond to emails efficiently, but if you are a one-person team wearing many hats, a standard inbox, such as [email protected], is all you need to get started.
2. Social Media: Public Customer Support
Social media support differs from other available channels primarily in one key point: responses are generally public and visible to anyone who wants to see them. New customers often take a glance at the brand’s social media to determine what kind of company it is and whether it takes customer service seriously. Every interaction with customers on social media is an opportunity to show who you are, and it can determine the fate of a potential relationship with everyone who comes across that conversation. While social media tends to focus on negative interactions, satisfied customers can write a positive review about their experience, further boosting your reputation. The key is not to try to be everywhere at once. Provide customer support on social media platforms where you already have a marketing presence. This should include not only the channels you want to spend time on but also those that most of your customers use. The Pew Research Center’s report on social media usage is a useful resource for finding out which platforms suit your business.
3.
Live Chat: Resolving Customer Issues in Real Time
Live chat is another great way to provide quick and easily accessible support to current and potential customers. When considering implementing live chat, think about where you want customers to be able to access it (for example, high-priority pages in your store) and what you hope to achieve with it. You might want to invite potential customers who are browsing but haven’t completed their order to start a live chat conversation, or enable live chat for customers who have just made a purchase but may have a question or issue. New customers can also use the live chat feature to learn more about a specific product (like sizing or shipping), allowing them to feel confident in their decision to choose your brand. For example, Luxy Hair invites shoppers to start a conversation, providing automated answers to frequently asked questions.
4. Phone Support: Providing a Direct Line for Your Business
Many customers still prefer phone calls for urgent issues that require timely resolution, especially if they have a problem with a high-priced product. Remember, positive customer experience is about meeting your users’ expectations. Not every type of business needs phone support, 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 are not expected to be available 24/7, so post your availability on your website, along with expected customer response times. You could even take it a step further and set up a VIP phone number for your most loyal customers.
5. Educational Content: Equipping Customers with Answers
You can prevent (and reduce) support questions by creating a Frequently Asked Questions page or instant answers, or by providing other documentation that shares your essential policies and answers common customer inquiries. Providing customers with this information and making it easy to find gives them the option for self-service 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 it is up to date.
Essential Tips for Improving Customer Service
1. Know Your Product Well
Few things frustrate customers more than asking a question and getting an incorrect or incomplete answer. It doesn’t matter whether you offer a wide range of products, do direct shipping, or are new to your product category. Not knowing your products is like forgetting the lyrics to a song while singing on stage.
2. Learn to Use Positive Language
Being positive doesn’t mean you have to limit yourself to a cheerful and upbeat tone. Rather, it’s about avoiding negative phrases that can lead to a negative reaction from customers. Positive language focuses on solutions, not problems, and gives people a sense of empowerment. Phrases like “you should” or “I need you to” may be simple and direct, but they can make customers feel like the burden of solving the problem falls on them, even if it’s not their fault. You can turn negative statements into positive ones by making a few simple changes. For example:
Negative: “To get started, you need to check your order number. Okay, thank you. It says here that the product won’t be available for a few weeks, so I can’t place an order for you until it arrives at our warehouse.”
Positive:
“First, let’s check your order number. Great, thank you! It looks like the product will be available next month. I can place an order for you as soon as it arrives at our warehouse.”
Customers do not want to be lectured about what you cannot do for them; they want to hear about the options available to solve their problem. Therefore, make sure your customer service team is committed to finding a solution and uses language that invites them to cooperate with you in finding that solution.
3. Adapt Your Tone to the Context
There are two important concepts in business communication: voice and tone. Basically, voice is the primary style that you want your brand to have, and tone is the appropriate style for a particular context. A dog-loving brand may want to replicate the enthusiasm that its customers feel for their furry friends. However, responding in the same voice without adapting your tone to an email about a late shipment or a damaged order is inappropriate. Similarly, while your brand voice should generally be consistent, you may want to match the tone of customers who have a different style of conversation.
4. Clear Writing Skills
One of the biggest reasons for poor communication is smart writing at the expense of clarity. Creativity is an important part of making the support experience stand out, but the priority is to write clear and straightforward answers that cannot lead to misunderstandings. 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 specialists but do not assume they know what you know. Great support starts with writing clear and straightforward answers that cannot cause misunderstandings. For example, if you want the customer to share their order number, do not just tell them to look it up in their inbox. Provide them with step-by-step instructions on how and where to find it. Think about the instructions you would provide and how to phrase your answer if you were helping a friend deal with an issue.
5. Advocate for Your Customers
Traditionally, companies are expected to empathize with their customers. But empathy is only a passive first step in the equation. Advocacy is actively supporting your customers’ concerns and engaging in identifying potential solutions. Advocacy works because it is easy to identify and understand – customers feel it through actions and descriptions of failed attempts.
6. Creativity to Deliver Great Experiences at Low Cost
“Low-cost great moments” rely on non-monetary gestures for customers, which create lasting loyalty through the care shown in these gestures. Customers are attracted to free things, but free items alone do not make them loyal. Creativity in great moments relies on creativity rather than capital. Here are some examples: sending handwritten thank-you notes, including creative add-ons in the packaging, providing samples that complement a purchase, offering surprise discounts after a purchase, and creating personal connections with short videos.
7. Understand How to Set Proper Expectations
Setting proper expectations can directly affect how customers perceive the quality of your support and makes the difference in whether they will be satisfied or dissatisfied. Even small details make a difference: if your chat window says “Get an immediate answer” and the actual response time is three minutes, customers may end up frustrated for reasons you could avoid. The golden rule is to set low expectations and deliver results better than customers anticipated, which is easier said than done. There will be times when you feel the internal pressure to make unrealistic promises, such as when you are unsure exactly when an item will be back in stock or if something went wrong with an order and you want to compensate the customer. Big promises that you will struggle to keep, or even exceed, can heighten customer expectations.
How
Dealing with Difficult Customer Support Scenarios
Listening to angry customers can be one of the toughest aspects of managing your own business. It can be easy to take their frustration personally, even if you know there is nothing you could have done differently. It’s hard to avoid mistakes altogether, but the upside is that they often provide an opportunity to demonstrate your commitment to gaining new customers. If you can rebound from the mistake, the customer may end up being more loyal than if the issue had never occurred. This is known as the service recovery paradox, a term coined by Sundar Bharadwaj and Michael McCollough.
When an angry customer calls you, don’t view it as a lost opportunity to make a good impression, but rather as an opportunity to make amends. Customers want to feel heard and to know that you are on their side to help them achieve a positive outcome. Here are some practical strategies you can use to turn the customer experience around:
1. Anticipate Likely Issues in Advance
Some problems will be encountered more frequently than others. For example, most vendors will wonder why their orders haven’t arrived. It’s worth creating a template to address such inquiries. Try to identify common questions early so you’re prepared for them during peak sales periods. Once you have a good answer prepared for
Source: https://www.shopify.com/blog/customer-service#scenarios
Leave a Reply