The value of providing superior customer service can’t be overstated.
The more emphasis you place on the experience a person has with your brand can yield higher ticket sales, future revenue, and referrals to your offerings among the customer’s sphere of influence.
Providing a remarkable customer experience regardless of the industry will provide future growth opportunities for your business.
In addition, a positive customer experience will create brand loyalty and better customer retention and encourage them to become brand ambassadors of your brand, recommending your offerings to all their friends and family.
The ROI Value In Better Customer Service
Customer service is the lifeblood of any business. It doesn’t matter the industry; the better relationships you can build with clients and customers, the greater retention and repeat business you’ll muster.
Focusing on improving your customer’s experience with your brand is a crucial way to increase future revenue. In fact, data shows that repeat customers are 27% more likely to buy from you again, are easier to convert, and have a higher average sale than a first-time buyer.
What’s more, a repeat customer is 70-90% much easier to convert than a new customer unfamiliar with your brand.
There are many reasons for this statistic, but some of the more essential criteria include familiarity with your products and trust in your services and offerings.
Another hidden benefit of repeat customers is that people who use your products and offerings are more likely to refer to your business and brand within their sphere of influence than those unfamiliar with your business.
Creating a group of brand ambassadors directly correlates to their experiences with your services; providing a fantastic product and outstanding customer service correlates to more references and recommendations to friends, parent groups, family, and associates.
Improving Your Customer Service Experience
In order to improve your customer experience, otherwise known as CX, requires a deeper understanding of what customer experience and customer service are in greater detail.
Customer Service Defined: Customer service is the support you provide your customers before, during, and after a sale. It’s the processes and steps you provide for every business and individual interacting with your brand.
Customer Experience Defined: The interactions potential and repeat customers have with your brand from the first experience to the last are what define the customer experience.
Taken together, customer service and customer experience should be intertwined to create an overall positive experience for the customer and everyone in your organization who interacts with the customer.
Customer Service Vision: Create a clear vision of what you want your customer service experience to be. Your organization should prioritize a positive customer experience, and to do so, you need a clearly outlined point of emphasis for all staff to understand and follow.
Understanding Your Customers: Deep dive into who are your ideal customers and get to know what makes them tick. Understanding your customers requires you to listen and ask for feedback.
Knowing that there will be outliers with your responses from customers, you are looking for common trends and themes that you can digest and pivot to enhance their subsequent experiences with your brand.
The Ties That Bind: Creating a better customer experience through the quality of service you offer should parallel each other. Create an emotional connection with your customers by creating special offers and promotions, turning repeat customers into avid fans. To do so, consider providing;
- Exclusive deals
- Loyalty rewards programs
- Thoughtful email marketing
- Engaging social media
Take Real-Time Data: You can offer real-time and request reviews during and immediately after a guest or customer experience. Capture this data in real-time to improve customer service.
Emphasize Their Experience: Prioritize customer service and train your staff.
By putting the needs and interests of your customers first, you’re better able to train your staff and encourage them as the front-facing department of your organization to incorporate those elements into enhancing the customer’s experience and, thereby, their opinion of your brand.
For example, you may have inbound calls to your sales team. In sales, we know that speed of response is one of the most crucial factors in converting a lead to a sale. But in some cases, such as being out of the office, some calls may end up unanswered, and those leads are lost.
The solution is to get software or service to forward calls to the appropriate individuals. It doesn’t need to be complicated, either. For example, through those service providers’ customer service departments, you can learn how to forward calls on CenturyLink or use other options like Grasshopper or RingCentral through those service providers’ customer service departments.
Employee Feedback: Ask for and act upon regular employee feedback and implement changes to enhance employee experiences to assist them. If all you do is focus on the customer, you’re putting your staff in a difficult position to represent your organization’s objectives.
Taking employee feedback on tactics and offerings to get as broad a perspective as possible will allow you to pivot better and provide better customer service and experiences.
Customer service management needs to be a dedicated department within your organization. This may already be a point of emphasis for large businesses, but if not, budget and hire someone to create and manage the department.
For small businesses where owners and managers have to wear multiple hats, you should designate one person as your customer service or management expert. This person should create a plan to improve customer service, train staff, and troubleshoot when necessary.
