Supporting your customers by going the extra mile with enhanced support leads to happy customers and long-term loyalty.
Understanding what is important to customers and what support and services will help make their lives easier is vital to ensuring that you keep your customers happy and build strong customer relationships. Great customer experiences are based on responsiveness, personalization, engagement, and being proactive with helpful solutions. It’s also about doing more than is expected and trying a little harder to take the “pain” out of their day.
According to Gartner, 80% of a company’s future revenues will come from just 20% of its existing customers. Obviously, this means your existing customers are extremely valuable and going the extra mile for them throughout their customer experience with your company is time and effort well spent. Are you doing everything you can to cultivate and deepen your relationships with customers by offering enhanced services when you uncover their additional needs?
At Laplink, we’ve worked to put this customer service philosophy into action with an enhanced customer support program that goes above and beyond traditional product support. Our company makes software that simplifies the process of moving programs, files, and settings from an old Windows PC to a new one. Microsoft doesn’t offer an easy way to do this, so users generally have to move everything manually to an external hard drive, track down software, serial numbers, browser settings, and handle many other customizations. It can take several hours and still users end up missing things. PCmover allows you to automatically connect two PCs wirelessly or with the optional high-speed transfer cable, select what you want to move, and then PCmover moves everything automatically.
Initially, our customer support team started off only offering product support. However, many of the support calls we received from customers were related to how to deal with getting a new PC set up or other problems they were having. Since we are in the business of helping people get a new PC up and running, we decided to invest in expanded customer support and tech support to help customers with problems, sometimes handling issues that aren’t directly about our product itself — all for free and on a 24/7 basis. The reception among our customers has been very positive and has contributed significantly to our ongoing success. We have found that by helping our customers during a challenging PC set up, we are building relationships and loyalty that can’t be beat. Our customer support team is facilitating personal connections as they work together to find immediate solutions to customers’ challenges and that’s exactly what customers want.
So, the next time one of your frustrated customers calls your product support line to vent, take a minute to think about other challenges you can help them solve. Does your customer support team have the skills and expertise to jump in right away and resolve a problem for them — even if it is unrelated to your product? Maybe it’s simply the act of actively listening and empathizing with your customers to help them think clearly about the situation. As Bill Gates has said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
If your customer support team is able to help customers out when they need it the most, that is a golden opportunity to build loyalty. And, the good news is that these loyal customers will be primed to listen to new solutions and products that your company may want to sell to them in the future.
At the end of the day, it’s all about doing the right thing for customers. And, doing the right thing by going the extra mile for customers always pays off in the long run. Average companies deliver only what is asked of them. Companies that are striving to be exceptional do more.
About the author
Thomas Koll is CEO of Laplink Software, the global leader in PC migration and creator of PCmover, the only software of its kind recommended by Microsoft, Intel and all major PC manufacturers, and writes frequently about a range of technical topics. Previously, he was Chairman and CEO of Infowave and Corporate Vice President at Microsoft. He holds a Master’s degree in Political Science from the Free University of Berlin. He can be reached at tk@laplink.com.
