The experience your customers have when interacting with your business is important, and it can mean the difference between brand loyalty and creating detractors. People will remember good and bad experiences and happily tell others about them, helping to influence traffic to your site and your brand reputation. If customer service is lacking and leaving a lot to be desired, you’ll want to find ways to improve the overall service. To help, here are some top tips on improving your customer service approach.
Offer an omnichannel experience
There are more ways than ever for your customers to interact with your brand, so it is important to modernise your customer service approach. Everyone is different and will have a preferred way to contact you, with some preferring not to call or visit a physical location if you have one. Instead, an omnichannel experience provides multiple avenues, providing choice for the consumer. As well as interaction through social media channels, you can provide a live chat function on your website, or help a customer contact via messaging apps instead. Many companies partner with a customer experience agency to help bring to life an omnichannel experience, assisting with implementing software solutions to achieve this. Consulting with experts will help to improve customer service efforts and implement the necessary changes quickly.
Actively listen and acknowledge your customers
There’s nothing worse than feeling like no-one is listening or taking your query seriously. This is where actively listening to your customers can quickly make improvements. Whereas in face-to-face interactions you can use facial cues and prompts to show active listening, this is not possible over the phone or through messaging. Acknowledging what the customer is saying, using their name to personalise and providing audible cues during your conversation can make a huge difference. Think about how you would speak to people you know such as friends and family and adapt this into a professional environment. This will help to build rapport with your customers and ultimately help them feel much better and relaxed when interacting with your brand.
Improve your websites’ UX
When customers can’t achieve what they want when visiting your website because of a poor design or confusing menu structure, this will affect customer service. The customer journey needs to be visualised so that the design reflects an easy, simple to follow process. If there are too many options and no clear call to actions to help, a customer will either soon look elsewhere or complain about the service. Taking the time to put the customer experience first will help your business evaluate design choices and make positive changes. If a customer can find what they need effortlessly and complete an enquiry or purchase without issue, this will minimise the need for further contact and support at the first hurdle.
Create a feedback loop
If your business is not already asking for feedback from customers, this can be an ideal way to discover pain points, issues and where improvements are needed. Without a feedback loop in place, you may lose some customers to competitors and be unable to act swiftly to implement change. This can be achieved through asking for feedback via email, creating surveys or by providing an interactive option via your website. The quicker you can implement a method of collating feedback, you can begin to share positive reviews too. Providing a platform for your customers to comment will help them be more engaged with your brand and help your customer service improve further.
