5 Pillars of Customer Service Excellence

Customers look at the whole shopping experience when buying from a brand. That’s more than just the buying process. It also includes the customer service experience when they need help.

Believe it or not, 94% of customers say brand loyalty depends on customer service excellence. If your customer service team delivers amazing support, you can avoid getting bad reviews and wrecking your brand’s reputation.

So, how can you deliver great support? Let’s take a look.

1. Focus on Responsiveness

Between managing your daily operations and fulfilling orders, you have a lot on your plate in a business. In some cases, that may lead to employees having too much to do and not responding to customers quickly.

Long wait times lead to unhappy customers and refunds. Focus on responsiveness to get back to customers quickly to solve their problems. Doing this ensures you get a brand reputation for responding quickly and addressing customer concerns.

2. Manage Product Knowledge

As your business grows, your customer service teams get a lot of product issue questions. It isn’t that you have a bad product. There’s no getting around many customer service requests when you do enough sales volume.

The problem is when customer service employees can’t quickly find product information to answer questions. Centralize that knowledge in a knowledge management solution to make it more searchable for employees.

3. Stay Friendly

You won’t always have the most friendly customers. They may occasionally get frustrating to deal with and cause your customer service team members to lose their cool.

Make sure your team has the soft skills required to stay calm in stressful situations. Offer training on phone etiquette that helps your team focus on delivering results and not making a bad situation worse.

4. Make Customer Information Available

Personalization isn’t only part of the buying process. Understanding who your customers are when they ask for help may also help your team provide a personalized support experience tailored to a customer’s needs.

Use software to manage customer information and make it available for support calls. An effective ERP software will help your team understand who they talk to and help provide better service.

5. Get Feedback

No customer service team is perfect. They all make mistakes, have a bad day, or fail at delivering results. The question is, what will you do to improve next time?

Have a customer support agent ask for feedback from the customer about their experience. The goal is to learn where you’re weak and make operational changes to improve.

Strive for Customer Service Excellence

You may offer a great product, but that doesn’t mean customers will never have issues and reach out for help. In some cases, you may also have a long sales cycle that involves touching base with customers over time as you prepare them for a sale.

You won’t get far if you can’t manage customers’ expectations with customer service excellence. Make sure you examine every touch point with customers to ensure they get the service they deserve.

Once you nail the customer experience, you can then start working to optimize other business operations. From building great products to enhancing productivity, you can learn more on the blog. Head back there to read the rest of the articles.