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Customer centricity is the new buzzword in the world of business. New entrants are building their business model around the customer. Older companies engaged in the vicious downward spiral of cost competition have realized the futility of pure cost competition. They are now transitioning into customer-centric businesses.
Putting the customer at the center of your business is no easy feat. It implies designing everything, from products to business workflow processes to deliver value to the customer. The traditional model of business with a rigid framework is dead. The top goal of any good company is to build a resilient business, and the pandemic has stressed the need for such a business model.
Business resilience comes from a few key factors:
● Customer satisfaction
● Good margins
● Streamlined cash flow
● Capital reserves
Although the above factors look disjoint, the first and most important factor of customer satisfaction feeds into the other three. Good margins streamlined cash flow, and capital reserves are by-products of customer satisfaction. A logical question that follows is “how do I improve customer satisfaction?” Let’s understand a few ways to do so.
Know your customers
No! We are not talking about getting the customers to fill KYC forms. Knowing your customer means understanding what they need. Your business is catering to a specific set of customer needs. Exploring these customer needs and aligning your business to cater to them is the best way to enhance customer satisfaction.
So how can you get a hold of customer expectations? There are several ways but getting customer feedback on your product or service and analyzing the customer feedback in clusters is the key here. Why clusters? Because it averages out the outliers and helps you zero in on the problem factors that appear more often in customer feedback.
Most customers are happy to fill a feedback survey. The trick is to draft the feedback survey questionnaire to collect relevant data in a quantifiable manner that lends itself to further analysis. Getting to know issues from the customers themselves helps you gain free insights into the core issues that need to be solved before they spiral out of control.
Personalization
Personalizing your service for customers plays into customer ego and helps in connecting at a deeper level with your customers. It makes your service much more engaging than an automated, generic, and robotic chatbot or email interaction. Everyone likes to be remembered. It makes them feel important, and your customers are no different. Give respect and take respect!
So how do you go about getting this right? Personalization is all about data. A helpdesk application with knowledge bank and historical records can help agents access customer information and transaction records that helps in delivering a personalized service quickly and effectively. In customer service, there is nothing better than a little personal touch.
Service Availability
Service availability is a critical factor in customer satisfaction. Being available to customers on multiple channels allows the customer to contact your service team using their choice of the communication channel. It could range from a phone call, SMS, WhatsApp, social media, or email. Your customer support team needs to be ready on all frontiers to deliver service.
A great way to achieve this is through a helpdesk application for your customer support center having omnichannel capabilities. A good helpdesk application can integrate email, phone calls, SMS, WhatsApp, and social media to centralize ticket handling and issue resolution.
Information resources
Many customers have a hands-on approach to issues and would like a DIY solution. A great way to help them is to have enough helpful resources like FAQs, instructions, tutorials, and demo videos available on your website. Education about the products is also a great way of promoting it because customers buy what they understand well.
Educating and making your customers aware of your products might seem like a wasteful endeavor. But you are grossly mistaken to think so. A customer who solves the issues himself or herself is one less customer raising a ticket. It unburdens the customer service center while ensuring customer satisfaction. Having detailed information resources about your product is a great way to build customer trust.
Speed up the customer service
Customers interacting with your customer support team are facing an issue with your product and it is essential to think about it in those terms. When we face a problem with something, the first thing we lose is trust. You don't want customers to do that with your product. So, the best thing you can do to mitigate the situation is to resolve the problem as quickly as you can.
Customers expect a fast resolution of their issues. If your customer support team takes a long time to respond, make the customer run from one desk to another, or are clueless about solving a problem, then you just lost a customer. What's more! A lost customer cascades into more lost customers by word of mouth and referrals. Customer support speed can be improved effectively by using helpdesk software with automation and a knowledge base. Coupled with tools like AI and data management, helpdesk solutions give you a boost in customer service.
Treat customers with respect
It is an obvious statement, but one that is difficult to inculcate in routine customer service. Customer service personnel have to interact with various types of people, many of whom lack a basic understanding of the product or are in an angry mood. Interacting with customers and directing the conversation towards a solution is a complicated task.
Empathizing with customers goes a long way in building relationships and trust. Recruiting agents with an innate drive to deliver excellent customer service helps you put together a great team. Further training and opportunities to hone their skills help agents develop skills in handling different situations. A business that treats the customer as king in all aspects, is a winner in the long run.
Employee goodwill
Employees are the face of your organization that is visible to your customers. Happy employees make decisions in the interest of the business and customer goodwill. Motivation makes the employee go further than their line of duty to resolve customer problems. Employee support and teamwork set the right environment for the customer service center to deliver high-quality customer service.
So how can you develop a great team from the right set of people? The answer to that question is autonomy and support. People love working with autonomy given a set of responsibilities and challenges. When they do well, the business does well. However, on rare occasions, they stumble upon a challenge. That's where having a support system in the form of helpdesk application, teamwork, and managerial leadership comes in. A combination of these results in the development of a great team that can deliver spectacular results.
A few final words
Delivering excellent customer support stems from a passion for being customer-centric. It requires the drive from the top management and the efforts of employees to become a customer-centric team and enhance customer satisfaction. Fortunately, you can leverage technology to achieve this difficult goal.
At Wolken, we have been working with our partners to deliver excellence in customer support through our IT capabilities. Our helpdesk solutions have helped reputed brands achieve improvements in customer service capabilities and improve their bottom line. Get in touch with our team to find out how we could help your business.
