Good writing means getting as close to reality as words will allow. Without an ounce of exaggeration, being a good writer is the most overlooked, yet most necessary, skill to look for when it comes to hiring for customer support.
Unlike face-to-face or even voice-to-voice interactions, writing requires a unique ability to convey nuance. Good writers also tend to use complete sentences and proper grammar — qualities that subtly gesture toward the security and trustworthiness of your company. Even if your company offers support primarily over the phone, writing skills are still important. Not only will they enable your team to craft coherent internal documentation, they signify a person who thinks and communicates clearly.
Solving the problem is good, but finding clever and fun ways to go the extra mile — and wanting to do so in the first place — is even better. This person is having a really bad day. You know what? They have to go the extra mile naturally. In these situations, it helps to have a team of people with some mastery of persuasion so they can convince interested prospects that your product is right for them if it truly is.
Effective customer service means having the ability to make minor changes in your conversational patterns. This can truly go a long way in creating happy customers. Language is a crucial part of persuasion, and people especially customers create perceptions about you and your company based on the language that you use. Responding to questions with positive language can greatly affect how the customer hears the response:.
Conversely, the second example is stating the same thing the item is unavailable , but it focuses on when and how the issue will be resolved instead of focusing on the negative. It takes time for team members to build up their product knowledge. And if you have a very complex product, it may take your team members years to learn every one of its ins and outs. However, the right customer support tool can help you mitigate those gaps in product knowledge.
Every great customer service professional needs basic acting skills to maintain their usual cheery persona in spite of dealing with people who are just plain grumpy. On the other hand, there is a limit to the amount of time you can dedicate to each customer, so your team needs to be concerned with getting customers what they want in an efficient manner.
As Emily Triplett Lentz writes:. Sometimes, customers are going to throw your team curveballs. Even better, look for people who will take the initiative to create guidelines for everyone to use in these situations moving forward. But as their business grew, they noticed a growing number of pre-sale questions. OptinMonster decided to add in a live chat feature and to outsource the agents to LTVPlus, rather than hiring locally, to save money.
They decided to start with day shift coverage and after just 3 months the result was an e-commerce conversion rate that multiplied by Do companies that invest in customer service actually see any benefits from it? The available data strongly says yes. For starters, when you improve your customer service, you improve your public image.
Public image means how people talk about you, how the press writes about you, and especially online reviews. Having a strong public image is essential if you want to attract new customers, and return old ones.
Providing excellent customer service is vital to a good public image, and a good public image is vital for growth. One study found that the cost of converting new customer is 6 to 7 times more expensive than bringing back an old one. The evidence is clear — customers care about how you treat them.
Treating them well, can and will result in some great benefits for your business. There are a few basic methods that you can put into place that will help improve how you interact with your customers and ensure that they have a good experience with you. The key to good customer service is establishing a human interaction with your customer. When they reach out to you, they want to know they are dealing with a fellow human and not just a robot.
Whenever a customer reaches out to you, you instantly have information from their previous sessions on hand to help them out. Then, when they do reach out, you can use their name and past questions to give a more personalized experience. To make your interactions even better, let your customer service representatives show some of their personality.
Be friendly, helpful, funny, and really try to get to know your customer. Set aside some time to talk about your company voice, and make sure your customer service reps are all on the same page. A company, or brand, voice is the personality and emotion you use throughout your online interactions.
When you develop a brand voice you should use it throughout your website, marketing materials and when providing customer service. For more on developing a brand voice, you can check out this guide. They adopted customer service tools to ease the pressure on their support team while simultaneously improving the customer experience. That way, reps weren't being overworked and had the time and energy to provide excellent customer service.
Additionally, Santa Cruz used its new tools to conduct reporting as well. This allowed the company to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction while its customer base continued to grow. Even though more customers were interacting with the business, each interaction still felt genuine and personalized because of the customer data Santa Cruz had gathered.
Ride-hailing app Lyft succeeds in the customer service space by making its customers proud by putting its money where its mouth is toward values and causes customers truly care about. For example, Lyft announced its commitment to minimizing the environmental impact of the millions of car rides it provides every day by declaring all of its rides to be carbon neutral, thanks to its voluntary purchase of carbon offsets.
Lyft condemned the executive order, writing in an email to customers:. We stand firmly against these actions, and will not be silent on issues that threaten the values of our community. Wherever you stand on these important issues, it's undeniable that Lyft's customers care about these topics all over the world. Good Customer Service Takeaway : An important facet of customer service that can be difficult to measure is standing for the values that are important to your customers.
I recently heard from Kristin Aardsma , who works in customer support at Basecamp. She spoke about Basecamp's customer support team -- more specifically, how the team measured success to reduce employee stress and turnover, and achieve better outcomes for customers. Part of Basecamp's solution to solving for the customer and reducing employee stress was creating time in the workday for research, innovation, and creativity.
To that end, customer support reps spend two hours per day off the phone lines and away from the queue -- and they re-dedicate that time toward other projects. Employees have more opportunities for company-wide impact by collecting research, analyzing data, identifying patterns and trends, and working on projects and processes to achieve better results.
Two hours per day, or 10 hours per week, might sound like a lot, but it paid off for Basecamp. Employees weren't burning out due to overload and stress, and Basecamp wasn't over capacity and unable to solve customer problems because team members were happier. Good Customer Service Takeaway: Time spent away from the queue isn't time wasted -- so make sure to dedicate time during your week to identifying patterns, analyzing data, and creating processes to work more efficiently.
When you're burning through tickets or on the phones non-stop all day, it can be hard to step away, but front-line customer service insights and feedback can help your organization, so make sure to collect and share them.
Our friends over at Wistia -- a video hosting and analytics platform -- believe in the power of video to help tell company stories. And that isn't just restricted to marketing videos and social media content -- Wistia uses videos to provide great customer service, too.
Wistia team members create personalized how-to videos and individualized thank-you notes to help customers and demonstrate how to use different aspects of the software using a visual medium.
It makes sense for a video hosting brand to use videos when helping customers, but it's also helpful for the customers themselves, too. As Harper, a Customer Happiness team member at Wistia says ,. Realistically, eyes will gloss over a wall of text. That's how Wistia has seen such success in achieving good customer service -- by showing, rather than telling, customers how to troubleshoot, they can learn more effectively and remember solutions better than reading an email or hopping on a phone call.
Good Customer Service Takeaway : Don't feel restricted to phone calls to provide exceptional customer service. Instead, use technology to deliver support in the medium that makes the most sense. Tools like screenshots, GIFs, and videos can go a long way toward explaining a tricky concept, and they don't need to be fancy to work. Tools like Jing , Awesome Screenshot , LICEcap , QuickTime Player , and even your own smartphone or webcam can be used to create helpful resources customers can refer to again and again.
And, of course, if you're a HubSpot customer, you can integrate with Wistia to create and host video using its neat software. Skincare and makeup brand Glossier is hailed as an industry disruptor for preaching "skincare first, makeup second," but its customer-centric business model and customer service team are disruptive, too. CEO and co-founder Emily Weiss explains that she built Glossier around the crowdsourced opinions of real women about the beauty and skincare products they loved -- and the ones they wanted, too.
By reading and engaging with readers on her blog and on social media, she built a brand that was about affordable skincare and beauty products that made women feel good to use. That social media savvy and crowdsourcing prowess hasn't faded from view since Glossier has grown bigger and bigger -- in fact, it's still the guiding philosophy when Glossier brings new products to market, like when it launched its first sunscreen after calls from customers to create a product that wasn't sticky and didn't smell like sunblock.
Weiss told Entrepreneur that she received "so many DMs from people on Instagram writing to say, 'Thank you so much for listening; we've been waiting for this moment. Glossier's customer service department, otherwise known as the gTEAM , are responsible for collecting and responding to customer comments and messages on social media, and creating individualized experiences with each engagement.
Perhaps that's why the team is a team within the marketing department, and why they're called "editors" -- because content creation is a big part of Glossier's customer service strategy. With likes, retweets, emoji-decorated DMs, and blog posts, Glossier strives to make each piece of content engaging and authentic to the brand. The emails were clearly written by a real person, and they feature analytics and feedback tools to get quantitative numbers to support the qualitative feedback editors receive, too.
This simple act of proactive outreach and help was helpful and memorable for me as a customer, and it ensured that Glossier would solve a problem I was having with the product before I got frustrated and complained. Good Customer Service Takeaway: It's not enough to acknowledge and respond to every piece of incoming customer feedback if you're not listening to what your customers are saying.
Make sure you're responding to customer feedback, but also make sure your team is identifying and communicating any recurring trends to your company's leadership and product teams so you're able to consistently meet customer expectations and fulfill their needs. The Ritz-Carlton's service policies are so legendary, stories of satisfied customers have even made it into books -- like this one. In it, customer experience expert and author John DiJulius describes the story of his stay at a Ritz-Carlton hotel -- when he unknowingly left something behind in his guest room.
I left The Ritz-Carlton Sarasota in such a rush for the airport that I forgot my laptop charger in my room. I planned to call when I got back into my office, but before I could, I received a next-day air package from The Ritz-Carlton Sarasota. In it was my charger, with a note saying, 'Mr.
DiJulius, I wanted to make sure we got this to you right away. I am sure you need it, and, just in case, I sent you an extra charger for your laptop. Kinney, in Loss Prevention. After a sale, sales team members or other dedicated representatives may provide support and assistance with any problems or concerns that a customer might have. Good customer service happens when a business is committed to meeting the needs of all its customers. Ideally, customer service is woven into a company's culture and is present at every stage of a business-customer relationship:.
Identifying client or customer needs: A good salesperson can help a prospective client or customer identify what he needs or wants by taking time to listen and pay attention. When the sales team member has a better understanding of a prospect's circumstances, the salesperson is in a better position to offer ideas and solutions, and close the sale.
Ethical sales: An ethical salesperson does not "oversell" unnecessary products or services to a prospect. Good customer service means that a salesperson listens to the customer, takes into consideration the customer's budget and makes appropriate recommendations. In some cases, the salesperson may even refer the sales prospect to a competitor who is better able to meet the prospect's needs. Education and training: Knowledgeable salespeople and customer service representatives are better able to serve customers and clients.
Business owners who invest in training for their staffs reap rewards in the form of satisfied customers and happy employees. Responsiveness to client concerns: Owners of successful businesses want to ensure that clients and customers can get their questions answered and concerns resolved promptly. In addition, company management should be prepared to analyze customer input and make changes in policies, procedures and products to meet customer needs.
Developing a long-term sales relationship: Successful businesses establish long-term relationships with customers. In many cases, this may mean forgoing short-term sales and profits in hopes of gaining a customer's trust and loyalty.
In the end, a long-term customer may represent greater earnings for a business in the form of both ongoing sales as well as word-of-mouth referrals. Most small business owners genuinely want to offer excellent service to their clients and customers.
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