Customer service actions that are remarkable get talked about. And getting talked about is a great thing, right? No question. So ignoring great customer service actions is a big no-no.
Watch out for: 10 Guarantees of Poor Customer Service
We often get questions and comments on delivering great customer service. From clients and customers commenting on our blog. Many relate to customer service actions that are reminders of what we already know (but we occasionally forget).
These are bid enablers of customer service. They usually won’t create Wow service on their own, but their absence is noted by customers and makes excellent customer service just good or less.
Before we continue, let me ask you a question.
What works best for customer service design in your business? We would love to hear what it was. Would you do us a favor and post it in the comments section below? Be the one who starts a conversation.
Here is are 8 well-known customer service actions that are effective in keeping us on track so we consistently deliver what our customers want from us.
Great customer service … connect and give credence to every customer
This is critical. This is where you establish rapport and begin a relationship building process. Connecting means you’re building trust that runs both ways. Do this by engaging your customer. Start by giving them your name and asking theirs. Be interested in them and what they want. Ask questions. Listen. Respond appropriately. Have a conversation with them. Be genuine.
People know whether you are genuinely interested in helping them or not. If you are, they are more likely to respond positively to you and to develop trust with you. If you are really not interested, they’ll sense it. You’ll have a much harder time developing the trust you need to help them.
If you have a genuine conversation with your customer, you will discover insights to their wants and needs. Customers don’t always know what they want or they might have trouble expressing it. Often people know what they want, but they’re unsure how to get it. That’s where your engagement comes in.
By asking pertinent questions and paying attention to the answers, you can discover a lot about your customer. You can help guide them in getting what they want. That’s the role you fill.
Ideas and innovation most often need to rely on your team, but customers shouldn’t be discounted in pointing your team in the right direction.
That’s how you keep customers coming back.
Examples of good customer skills … pay special attention to complaints
Remember that complaints are often your best source of insights. In a recent article on Inc., Evernote CEO Phil Libin spoke about why he loves his most negative customers. As he said in the article, customer feedback is great for telling you what you did wrong. It is not as effective on what you should do next.
Doing a great job of fixing complaints can lead to some of your best advocates.
Define your unique value-add
You can’t always give the customer everything they want. Sometimes they want what you can’t do. Other times, it’s something you choose not to do.
That is why it is critical to know your value-add priorities. Every business has a value-add niche to fill. That means focusing on what your business does best for the customers it can best serve. This step is about picking your battles. It’s about choosing the customers who want what you are best able to do.
Execute your plan
This sounds easy and maybe it should be. But it’s where many businesses fail. They fail because they don’t manage the process of planning, doing, measuring and monitoring.
To execute well you need to be able to measure what’s important. What gets measured gets done. So convert your customer’s insights into actions you can measure. Then establish a system to measure the outcomes and the actions that produce them.
Customer’s time is most important
Pay close attention to making things as easy as possible for all customers. Particularly your demand for their time. Saving them time is usually the most important thing you can do for them.
This is icing on your customer’s cake. And like icing, it should never be skipped. It’s easy to do yet it pays huge dividends in customer loyalty.
As you plan your execution phase, make sure you plan a follow-up contact. Follow-up by phone, email, letter, visit, whatever works. More direct and personal is better but make it work for your customer and your company. Customers appreciate this because very few companies do it consistently.
Show appreciation
This often gets forgotten or it gets treated lightly. Too often when we hear a “thanks for doing business with us” it sounds phony, forced or robotic. People often say it out of habit but they put no feeling or authenticity into it.
So, when you thank your customers, be real about it. Make it genuine. Thank them in multiple ways, not just once. Make sure they know you are grateful for their business.
If you never ignore any of these 8 actions with every customer, you’ll find your level of customer service will increase dramatically. Coach your employees to understand and pay attention to these actions (every time) and you’ll see your customer loyalty and customer retention go through the roof.
Bottom line
What’s missing is the concept of service. The desire to help clients achieve their goals rather than to assume you know what their goals should be. Talk about direct response metrics won’t help a client whose brand awareness is trailing by ten points.
Interestingly, top digital players like Yahoo! and Google do understand this. However, many in the industry are still the same arrogant bunch that went down in the first dotcom boom and will surely go down again, screaming “nobody gets it!” along the way.
It’s up to you to keep improving your customer service performance and creativity.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your customer service?
Do you have a lesson about making your customer service better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
More reading on customer service from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Data is one of the most powerful tools that
any business has at its disposal. As long as they use it properly, of course.
Doing social media well is a challenge, and it is one area where many of the
biggest businesses still fail. Here are some of the ways that data analytics
can take any business’ social media to the next level.
Anticipate Trends
It doesn’t matter what specific market or
industry your business operates in, if you are able to accurately predict market trends then you will
have a serious advantage over your competitors. Being able to predict trends
means that you can get ahead of the curve and can plan proactively instead of
reactively.
But if predicting trends was so easy,
everyone would do it. By setting up social media bots and listeners to gather
and scrape data for you, you can automatically monitor the most important
people and groups on the platform who are relevant to your business. This data
enables you to anticipate what your competitors are going to do and what your
audience is about to start demanding.
Getting even slightly ahead on this stuff
can translate into a massive advantage over your competitors, so it is worth
investing the time and money necessary to set up an effective social media scraping and listening operation.
Gain Insight About
Consumers
Understanding your market as an abstract
entity is important, but it is also important to understand your consumers as
individuals. Think about all the communications that your customers send to
their friends and family through social media. If you can gain insights about
these communications you will gain similarly prescient insights about the
individuals sending them.
Not all of these communications will be
accessible to you, but a great many of them will be, more than enough to be of
value to you. Social media listening tools will enable you to identify when
messages relevant to your business are being sent and automatically capture the
data.
Of course, the analytics are just as, if
not more, important than the data collection itself. If you don’t currently
have a data specialist on your staff, consider hiring someone with a graduate certificate in data analytics or
higher. Make sure that you pair your listening setup with a streamlined
workflow for the storage and analysis of any data that you collect.
Precisely Target Your
Content Strategies
Social media users are used to having
content wash over them. There’s so much content coming at most users that they
will only interact with a small fraction of it and won’t even be aware of most
of it. If you want to capture your users’ attention and win their engagement,
you need to serve up content that speaks to them.
The more data you have about your users and their engagement with your existing content, the more you will be able to refine your future approach. It’s no good just telling your social media manager to be more engaging.
Instead, you need to give them specific direction. If you can show them the data underlying your decisions, this will enable them to do their job better.
Collecting and analyzing the right data
from your social media efforts will make it much easier to formulate effective
strategies for the future. Don’t rely on indirect metrics for assessing your
social media performance. Instead, use listeners and scrapers as you need to
get the data you need.
