How Do You Provide Exceptional Customer Service?

When was the final time you provided good customer service?

Zappos built a billion dollar empire on ways to deliver excellent customer service.

In fact, delivering splendid customer service is 1 of Zappos' company values : Our purpose is simple: to live and evangelize WOW. "

And while there are thousands of negative client service stories on the web , there are very few positive stories.

Whether yous provide customer service by phone, email , live chat or social media , we've gathered some of our favorite stories online and share our thoughts on what makes them so expert.

What is good client service?

Tabular array of contents

How important is customer service?
The benefits of skilful customer service
Most popular customer service channels

5 good customer service examples to provide great service
- Respond as quickly as possible
- Know your customers
- Fix your mistakes
- Listen to your customers
- Remember long term – A customer is for life
3 ways to improve customer service
- Deliver context-based back up
- Innovate the customer journey
- Invest in human and automatic service channels

How important is good client service?

Customer service has an impact on both existing customers and potential customers. Did you lot know that 68% of consumers would react by telling family and friends about a bad experience by posting information technology on a social network. And almost fifty% of customers merits they would switch to a new make afterward just one bad experience!

And as each Facebook profile has an average of 338 friends , 1 negative experience tin can speedily accomplish thousands!

Yet, there is great value in ensuring you lot deliver positive client service.

According to the contempo Achieving Client Amazement report , 1 in iv customers is willing to pay upward to 10% more in almost every manufacture if they receive excellent client service!

And an astounding 93% of customers are likely to make echo purchases with companies who offer excellent customer service.

Increased sales and customers is i of the benefits. But there'southward more than, too.

The benefits of adept client service

The worst thing you tin can practice to a client is ignore them if they try to contact you. Hither's 3 additional benefits of customer service.

1. Increases loyalty and satisfaction

Happy customers are less likely to finish doing business with you. Plus, if they're loyal, they will spend more . Past using customer service to help them, y'all can save costs on marketing, helping you reach profitability faster.

2. Improves word of oral cavity recommendations

Proficient customer service is good marketing.

If a client is unhappy, they will tell their friends or mutter on social media, resulting in a negative perception of your make. However, if someone is happy with the service y'all provide, they tin influence their network to visit, shop or buy from yous.

three. Understand your customers ameliorate

What issues do your customers have issues with? What kind of feedback do they share with you? And how tin yous improve your product or service?

Without customer service, y'all're simply guessing. With customer service, you accept the answers. Directly from the customers themselves.

How you communicate with customers differs from company to visitor.

Today, there's no shortage of customer service channels.

Most popular customer service channels

Great customer service happens in all channels - email, social, SMS, chat and telephone.

But regardless of which channel your customers use, they all desire the same thing:

High quality back up.

And then, which channels should you exist agile in?

Hither'due south the 5 channels y'all demand to know most.

Telephone: Customers still beloved to speak to someone - peculiarly when it comes to urgent bug. While it's nice to be digital, always brand sure a client tin reach someone by phone.
Messaging apps: A key communication channel for Gen Z, messaging apps (recollect Facebook Messenger) are a great way to handle customer service letters over an extended period of time as they are managed as an ongoing conversation.
Social media: Your customers use social media. They also employ it to limited how they feel, so unlike a direct electronic mail to your back up team, engaging with customers on social media requires yous to be proactive. Find existing conversations and engage with your customers.
Email: After phone back up, email is the most-used customer service channel. The great matter almost e-mail is that it creates a digital record of correspondence - both for you lot and the client. And with the right engineering science, you can automate, escalate and route emails inside your organization to meliorate response times.
Conversation: Great for helping people directly on your website, live chat allows you to communicate with customers in existent time. The great affair about live chat is that it tin exist used past sales reps for upselling, marketing departments for atomic number 82 generation and customer service teams to handle questions from customers.

Then, at present you know the benefits of customer service and the channels yous tin use to communicate with them, here's five examples to inspire you to evangelize meliorate quality.

5 examples of smashing customer service

Here are v ways to stand out from the crowd to help you deliver first-class client service.

Let'south get started!

i. Respond as quickly as possible

One of the biggest factors in proficient customer service is speed, especially when a customer is requesting something that'southward time sensitive.

Several years ago, STELLAService conducted a response time report and plant that the average email response fourth dimension for the acme 100 retail companies was 17 hours. Today, information technology'due south not much better equally own customer service study institute that the average response time is 12 hours .

average customer service response times

Meanwhile Frost reported that 41% of consumers surveyed listed beingness put on hold every bit their biggest frustration.

The key takeaway?

Don't get out customers waiting.

A great example of this is when Lexus recalled a series of Lexus ES 350 sedans and asked car owners to visit a dealership to bring their cars in. Instead of having to sit in a waiting room watching their cars being worked on, their customers were given a brand new Lexus instead.

The SuperOffice customer service squad reduced response times from 5 hours to less than ane hour in less than half-dozen months, without compromising on quality. How? By using SuperOffice Service.

Desire to reduce your response times? Volume a demo here .

2. Know your customers

Neat interactions begin with knowing your customers wants and needs. Customers love personalization . Get to know your customers, recollect their names and previous conversations. If needed, make a note of what was discussed previously then you can refer to it the next fourth dimension yous meet.

In January 2020, Starbucks launched their "Every name'due south a story" campaign focusing on improving relationships with their customers . The award winning campaign promotes inclusivity, recognition and acceptance at Starbucks stores across the world. The video, a focal point of the entrada, has generated more than than 2.8 meg views on YouTube .

3. Fix your mistakes

Non taking responsibility of your mistakes is a certain fire way to getting a bad reputation. Transparency is important in business concern and customer service is no different. Always strive for a loftier quality output equally it shows you have a high level of standards.

An Amazon customer ordered a new PlayStation for his son for Christmas. When the shipping visitor delivered the parcel, the client was away and had a neighbor sign for the package. The neighbor left the package outside the customer's business firm and unfortunately, it soon disappeared. When the client realized what had happened, he was left in complete daze!

Even though Amazon was not to blame for this mistake, they were quick to resolve this by non just sending a new PlayStation in fourth dimension for Christmas, but did not charge for the extra shipping.

The Client Success team at Amazon showed great empathy hither towards the customer. Rather than sticking to their refund policy, so chose to do good. And that's what matters nigh.

4. Heed to your customers

Listening to your customers volition not but result in an indebted and happy customer, it tin can also go a long fashion in terms of keeping yourself on their radar for future business.

A three year old named Lily Robinson wrote a letter to Sainsbury's, a Great britain grocery store, a alphabetic character asking why 'tiger bread was called tiger bread and not giraffe bread?'. Lily was clearly onto something, as the bread really does look like a giraffe print!

In most cases, these types of suggestions are met with a simple "Give thanks you".

But, to Lily'due south surprise, Chris King, the client service manager of Sainsbury's responded with "I think renaming it to giraffe staff of life is a brilliant idea!". Several months afterward, the breadstuff was renamed to giraffe bread .

Listen to your customers

How's that for affectionate your customers ?

As head of our client service center, Stein Ove Sektnan couldn't concord more than with the value of listening to your customers. Here'south what he had to say on the topic.

"If you want to deliver bully service, yous should listen to your customers. Of class, it'south easier said than done. The difficult part is acknowledging feedback and learning from it. Most companies ignore feedback.

Use the feedback to examination new ideas, experiment and improve. Based on experience, listening to customers and acting on their feedback helped increase customer satisfaction score (CSAT) from 85% to 95%! "

5. Think long term – A customer is for life

Recall long term when dealing with customers. Past keeping customers happy, they will be loyal and through word of mouth, will do the marketing for y'all. In fact, co-ordinate to author Pete Blackshaw , a satisfied customer tells at least three friends (whereas an aroused customer tells iii,000!)

Peter Shankman , writer and business consultant, was ready to board a flight earlier tweeting "Hey, @Mortons – can you lot meet me at Newark airport with a porterhouse when I state in two hours? M, thanks. :)".

Personalized customer service

A fun attempt at humor, correct?

Peter admitted he was joking. He never expected anything after he sent that Tweet...

Only, every bit presently as Peter landed, a gentleman wearing a tuxedo was holding a bag that contained a porterhouse steak, shrimp, potatoes, napkins and silverware. Knowing that Peter was a regular client and having tracked down his arrival details, Morton's traveled more 23 miles to deliver his food and with - 1 of the greatest customer service stories of all time.

Would you travel 23 miles to provide i of the about legendary stories on customer service?

I know I would.

Julija Ražanskienė , Support Manager at SuperOffice since 2016, knows all about balancing short-term support metrics with a 18-carat passion for edifice long-term relationships with customers.

"Providing good service for our customers is not only nigh receiving high satisfaction scores or solving a high number of back up requests.

Our main focus is simple - to help others. Always. Nosotros practice this inside our customers, simply also in the support team itself.

Expert service tin exist interpreted differently by every single person.

Our goal is to build long-term relationships, considering in the end, this is what matters and nosotros truly hope that our customers feel it."

3 means to improve client service

If yous want to improve relationships with your customers , offset past making small changes to your customer service.

No matter how great your business organization is or how talented your team may be, customers volition always recollect the interactions they have with your company.

Hither are a few customer service tips to deliver a better customer experience:

deliver contextual based support
introduce the customer journey
invet in human and automated service

1. Evangelize context-based support

When customer service teams have a 360-degree view of a customer'due south needs are better at finding opportunities to improve customer experience.

An overwhelming majority (76%) of consumers await customer service reps to know their contact, product, and service information history.

Yet, co-ordinate to Microsoft'due south report on the State of Global Customer Back up, nigh half of respondents say agents almost never or just occasionally have the context they need to most finer and efficiently solve their upshot.

Customers feel frustrated whenever they take to repeat themselves or believe that client service lacks the knowledge about their issue. Past unifying customer information with a CRM , client service reps gain the context and ability to resolve inquiries in a single interaction.

Go full context on every client with SuperOffice Service . A seamless integration with SuperOffice CRM ways you tin access a client'south product and service history in seconds. Book a 30-infinitesimal demo and we'll walk you through this exact process.

2. Innovate the customer journey

Customer experience has go the driving strength that determines whether a customer will stay or carelessness your business. Withal, the methods of delivering a memorable customer experience has changed over the years.

Back in 2013, Walker Information surveyed more than 300 customer feel professionals from large B2B companies to proceeds insights on future trends.

While e-mail was the well-nigh mutual communication channel (77%) with customers, they predicted that online communities (68%), social media (63%), and corporate websites (61%) would come to boss the style customers interact with companies.

Were they right? And how has the situation changed since?

Sprout Social 's report shows that 88% of marketers understand the importance of customer service appearing on social media with nearly 45% of consumers surveyed maxim they take reached out to a company on social media .

While this is just ane sample of the evolution of customer support, companies must innovate their customer journeys to adapt to today's applied science, platforms, and demands.

iii. Invest in homo and automated service channels

Losing loyal customers is detrimental to every company's bottom line.

In CallMiner's 2020 Churn Index Report , 43.three meg people are switching companies and 88.3 1000000 are because switching for reasons that could have been avoided. That's more than $35.iii billion in lost revenue due to unplanned churn.

Companies that fail to invest in a combination of human and automatic self-service channels are missing opportunities to create loyal, satisfied customers.

Automated self-service channels, such equally a noesis base , offer customers the ability to solve issues on their own.

All the same, if they tin't find the data that they need, that's when human service channels, such as real time chat , serve to complement client back up and address issues apace before frustrations escalate.

Conclusion

Working in a customer service section isn't glamorous.

In about cases, service agents are the everyman paid people in your company, they work ridiculous hours (24/7) and have to deal with unhappy customers.

Yet customer service is the most important department you have .

(Mayhap it's time to requite them a raise?).

Poor client service tin can kill your brand overnight.

While peachy customer service can help yous become a market place leader - to the level that companies are now using customer service as a manner to stand out confronting the competition. Are y'all ready to do the same?

Start delivering better client service today!

Book a demo with a SuperOffice proficient and we'll show yous how yous can utilize automation in SuperOffice Service to respond faster, escalate urgent tickets and improve squad efficiency.

Customers also enquire:

What are the 3 most important things in customer service?

The 3 important qualities of client service circumduct around professionalism, patience, and having a "people-showtime" attitude. Customer service will vary from customer to client, but as long as you're following these iii qualities, you volition be able to support them.

What makes a customer happy?

You tin make your client shappy past aligning with their needs and making sure that your business is committed to helping them achieve their long-term goals. Any business that puts the client first can make its customers happier.

Is it OK to disagree with a customer?

Yes, information technology's OK to disagree with a customer. Customers want to feel that you are listening to them, and when they know that yous are, it has a calming effect on them - and information technology shows y'all are taking their problem seriously.

Resources you will dearest:

2022 Customer Service Trends and Priorities
Supercharging Customer Service With Ai
12 Bottom Known, Just Equally Important Client Service Skills
v Ways To Reduce Customer Service Response Times
seven Ways To Provide "Best In Class" Customer Service

Customer Service

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