Ways to Deliver Consistently Great Customer Service

Nowadays having a great product is not enough. You need to have a reliable customer service team that lets you close those sales or address the grievances of your customers. If your customer service is performing poorly, you might hear about it on some online forum where some disgruntled ex-customer has started a campaign to boycott your services or products. The point is that bad customer service interactions prompt more reactions than good ones.

In conclusion, you have to nail every customer service interaction for your customers to be happy, even though it seems highly improbable. So, why don’t we shift our focus to things we can control and optimize to yield better results? Here’s a list of things you need to do to deliver consistently great customer service. Stay tuned.

Make the customer experience Effortless

What this means is simplifying things to a point that if a customer were to enter the sales funnel and complete the journey on their own without needing any assistance, they could. That’s the goal, and the closer your process is to this goal, the more likely your business is to succeed. Consider this example. Cox Communications adopted the strategy to make things simpler and displayed all necessary information upfront. Moreover, customers could talk to a trained customer service professional by simply dialing the toll-free cox customer service number, and their problem would get resolved.

This resulted in increased customer satisfaction and better retention as the customers didn’t have to jump through several hoops to get the product.

Proactively Diagnose Problem Areas

Another successful habit is to be on the lookout for patterns. Data normalization can help you in this regard. For example, it’s quite normal for a company to call as the customers need to contact customer service to activate the product. This shouldn’t raise any alarms. But if their customer service were to receive a lot of calls regarding the process after activation, then that is a problem that needs to be addressed. Data normalization will help you identify the areas that deserve your attention by setting the reference points accordingly.

There are two ways to handle this. The first is to keep taking on calls and assist the customers, or they could rectify the thing that’s troubling the customers and free up resources for other avenues. This will also help them focus on important areas that could, in turn, foster business growth. For example, launching new products or better research and development.

Diversity vs Niching Down

You must’ve seen hundreds of businesses diversify from their initial products and launch different ancillary products. But not every one of those products succeeds. While the actual reasons for success vs failure might be up for debate, there is a clear underlying pattern. If you’re in a business that caters to a specific niche of the market, then you may not benefit from diversifying your portfolio.

For example, if Creed, the British Royal Family’s official fragrance supplier, decided to make t-shirts for teens. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where they’d do well because it’s not their segment and their rich fragrance lineage will not be appreciated by teens.

Conversely, diversifying the products or services range might help some businesses too. For example, if an eatery specializes in making killer chicken sandwiches, chances are they’d do well if they introduced fried chicken on their menu. Sometimes it’s all about complementing something the right way. However, the ultimate decision to diversify or niche down will come down to your niche, relevancy, and expertise.

Weather the Storm When You Have to

Have you ever paid attention to retail clothing brands? When they introduce a new clothing collection to the public, it’s usually at full retail price with no discounts. However, the price keeps going down as the season progresses. If something doesn’t sell out all season, you might see a massive discount on it, for example, a 70% discount. This is how the business is done. There will inevitably be good and bad days and when it is a bad day, you should weather the storm because it’s only temporary.

Implement the Changes

So you conducted extensive surveys and figured out the root cause of the issue you’re facing. But that doesn’t mean anything if you’re not willing to take a bit of risk and incorporate those changes into your system. Implementing a change always comes with an accompanied risk of failure. If it works, perfect. If it doesn’t, you can make further tweaks until you get it right.

The key takeaway is that you never stop trying to make your products or services better.

Conclusion

This concludes this blog post on ways to deliver consistently great customer service that you can adopt today to accelerate your business’s growth. Remember that great customer service isn’t about delighting your customers, but consistently meeting your customers’ expectations.

Sources

https://www.helpscout.com/blog/good-customer-service/

https://hbr.org/2010/07/stop-trying-to-delight-your-customers