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How can you deliver a stellar customer experience to drive growth? Well to understand it, imagine that the customer wants a three-course meal, and you are serving it! The marketing team plays the role of the appetizer that engages the customer’s attention, your product or service plays the main course, and your customer support plays the role of the sweet dessert that tops it all. If you serve a great meal, the customer will come back for more! The key to doing great business is having all three dishes working in harmony building upon each other creating a great meal.
Let’s reclaim our focus on customer service. Customer service is at par with marketing and product design when it comes to challenges. Companies have to adopt a customer-centric approach to tackle these challenges and emerge as a reputed brand – the final goal. Products keep changing, businesses diversify, but the brand survives all these changes. As a business, what you are contributing is trust in your brand and excellent customer service is vital to achieving it.
Common roadblocks to a great customer experience
The Pareto principle states that 80% of the problems are caused by just 20% of the factors. If you address these 20% factors, 80% of problems will disappear as a quick fix to streamline operations. You can then tackle the remaining 20% on your own time. Customer service is no exception to this rule. Most problems in customer service are commonly prevalent. Let's look at some of them:
Delayed response
Customer service is like a jury – justice delayed is justice denied! A customer call, email, or message is a sign of the customer's problem with the product. It is a symptom that the customer could not receive the intended value from the product. Delay in resolution leads to the customer feeling abandoned and makes your product look like a white elephant. Common customer problems are simple to fix over the call if the agents have good helpdesk software.
In certain cases, the nature of the query demands a timeline for the resolution based on workflow. As a good practice, it is vital to acknowledge the customer query with a tentative timeline for query resolution almost immediately. This is possible by the use of chatbots or automated email responses. Notifying the customer of the progress in query resolution also helps them feel that you take their problems seriously.
Lack of knowledge base
There are few things more annoying than a confused agent who doesn’t know what he or she is doing or when the calls keep getting transferred from one agent to another. Customers expect agents to have a thorough knowledge and understanding of the product. Customers also expect agents to understand where they are coming from.
Proper training and using help desk software with built-in knowledge management capabilities can answer this problem. Tools like AI and machine learning can help in suggestions based on historical data enabling your agents to make better decisions. A comprehensive knowledge management system also retains records for easy retrieval that empowers the customer service agents. Proper training in understanding the customer needs, common problems, and empathizing with the customer ensures better customer service and issue resolution.
Inadequate channels of contact
Customers are an extension of your business, and you should keep them close at all times. Any barrier in communication between the customer and your business could become the tipping point for customer loyalty. Fortunately, the latest technology helps in managing it well. Help desk applications are enabled to interact in an omnichannel mode of communication.
Use help desk software that enables multiple modes of communication with your customers. Many help desk applications allow you to configure phone numbers, emails, WhatsApp, and social media within them to centralize your customer interactions. Features like this speed up the agent's work and streamline the response to customer tickets. Recording historical transactions and interactions in a single place helps in having relevant data even before the agent picks the customer's call and begins customer interaction.
Not completing the loop
Any communication is incomplete without feedback. Feedback is the only way to ensure that the customer understood the communication as intended. Feedback can gauge the effectiveness of customer service. Customer feedback is also a great way to understand core issues within the business operations.
We discussed the famous Pareto principle before. Well, a Pareto analysis of any problems requires data, and customer feedback is an elegant way of getting that data into your system. Many customers indeed fail to leave feedback. But it is misplaced to think that the customer is not doing their job. Providing feedback is not the customer's job, but collecting it is indeed yours! With the modern help desk software, collecting customer feedback is automated. Analyzing customer feedback can reveal potential product flaws, customer service issues, and gauge customer loyalty. You cannot go wrong with collecting and using customer feedback to improve your business operations.
Follow-up after ticket resolution
So, your agents found the resolution for a customer ticket and closed it in the system. But is the issue truly resolved? How can you be sure if you haven’t asked the customer? All it requires is a simple follow-up call after ticket resolution to check whether the customer got what they were looking for instead of assuming they did.
A follow-up after the ticket resolution also shows the importance you place on resolving customers' issues and delivering quality service. It makes the customer feel important, and the customer may reward you with pointers for improvement in the overall customer journey. Configuring a follow-up session in the help desk applications is easy and worthwhile.
Final few words
To summarize, delivering fantastic customer service requires paying attention to the customer's needs and adopting a customer-centric approach. A business that adopts such an approach becomes a resilient business that lasts long and creates a brand reputation with customer loyalty. Failure to streamline your customer service could throw you off the market.
At Wolken, we are committed to leveraging technology to enable our clients in delivering high-quality customer service. We have worked with several reputed brands and created long-lasting partnerships that thrive on the foundations of trust, quality, and customer-centricity. Get in touch without the team to find out more about how we could help your business.
