We all know that good customer experience is a must for today’s super-served customers as they always have an alternative (your competition), and they aren't shy about executing their right to change their suppliers of goods and services!
A funny thing about customer service is that most people say good customer service is more important than price when deciding on a purchase. And most businesses think their level of customer service is so high it makes them stand out from their competition.
But according to Zendesk 82% of people have stopped doing business with a company because of a bad experience and according to Customer Contact Weekly only 11% of customers felt that brands genuinely cared about improving their experience.
So, the stakes are high, and the competition is stiff.
Today your customers expect certain standards. They expect to be able to resolve a query, or at lease progress a query instantly, and sometimes 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. They expect to be able to access information immediately and to self-serve to solve everything from the most straightforward and basic problems to more complex issues they are facing.
They expect slick, professional, and personalised service. And your website is where they are most likely to expect to access it.
Luckily, there are several readily available tools that will help! But tools on their own won’t cut it. Look at the below strategies you need to get right to even be at the races.
Either manned by human agents or automated with clever chat bots, the ability to get help immediately is vital for today’s savvy customers. The help desk should be geared to use automation for simple to solve queries or be able to escalate the more complex and demanding so they receive the most appropriate response from your team.
Managing clients and their complaints via a simple ticketing system is a super-efficient way to deal with this important element of the business. Tickets can be easily routed to the right people to solve for your customer, saving everyone, customer and the organisation, a load of time and hassle in the process.
We love poking around in a well-appointed knowledge base. Think 'Frequently Asked Questions' that you can take as far as your imagination (and time) will allow.
Articles and videos can feature strongly as you provide the answers to everything from the most common, to the most complex query. Or even go for the gold standard and attempt to answer every single query your business gets.
Organising the answers to these questions into a knowledge base makes it easy for the customer to find the answers themselves, saving everyone’s time and massively improving the customer’s experience.
Reduce support tickets and querulous queries by supplying the information everyone is looking for in an easy to navigate and searchable section of the website instead.
Live Chat works from a sales and service perspective. There is nothing like having a question about a product, service, price, or guarantee answered in real time while you shop. And having the answers to your service-related questions instantly, combined with the Live Chats ability to perform complex tasks to solve for them is a god send for stressed and time poor customers.
Lives Chats can book meetings, qualify prospects, and help your after sales teams get to the right solutions faster, even for your most demanding clients.
A vital part of improving your customer service is about knowing what your customers think of your brand, products, and services. It's not enough to guess, or work on out-of-date data. The tools are available for you to accomplish the fundamental research right there on your site.
Today, even the most personal service is best delivered online as well as in person. And as we've seen during the pandemic, the online bit is arguably more important that the face-to-face version.
At Real Inbound we specialise in building an end-to-end marketing machine covering the whole customer journey and we'd be delighted to talk to you about the options available.
Or take a look at our 'How to Build your Marketing Machines Guide below for some tips about how to build your end-to-end solution using HubSpot technology.