4 Awesome Customer Service Tips For Digital Businesses
4 Kick-Ass Customer Service Tips + Real Examples You Must Employ in 2021. This gives your business an opportunity to deliver great customer service.
Do you wish your business was better at customer service?
Do you sometimes feel that if you invested in better customer service agents, your customers would come back more often?
If you're thinking about improving your customer service, especially for businesses that have recently moved into going digital, then now is a great time to invest in your learning and work hard to improve your business's reputation going forward.
4 Customer Service Tips to Delight your Customers
Here we share 4 ways to help you deliver great customer service for your online business.
1. Good Customer Service Is Vital
For any business to survive long-term, having a good attitude to customer service is absolutely critical.
Many large businesses will employ customer service teams that may number in the thousands just to be ready to take on any questions or queries, or even complaints. Customers' information is collected in order to transfer them into the system as quickly and efficiently as possible.
If your business is in a service industry, such as IT consultancy or anything that needs a membership service, then having the right customer services agents on hand and ready to respond to customers is even more important, as customers will feel less valued if they cannot get their query answered as quickly as possible, and you may then lose a customer.
While losing one customer may not be so bad in the short term, in today's digital world, that one customer may do a lot of digital damage by creating reviews and posting negative comments that could influence other customers.
To negate this problem, here are four tips to ensure your business is taking customer services seriously and getting the best out of your customer service team, even if that team is just you.
2. Invest In Customer Chat Options
The title of this section is 'invest in customer chat options,' not customer contact options.
There is a big distinction to be made here, as most customers these days really hate the idea of filling in an online form on your website, or, even worse, picking up the phone and giving you a call.
With the universal adoption of social media options and the privacy concerns around spam emails, more customers would prefer to contact you via the means that they feel more comfortable.
What this means for you is that you need to be available on all of the major platforms and be able to respond as quickly as possible. Platforms such as WhatsApp Messenger and Facebook Messenger are two of the most popular for customers to contact their favourite businesses on.
The problem with being on every chat platform is that it becomes more and more difficult for a single person or a small team to be dedicated to responding to every query.
This is why having a chat client available on Android, Apple, and even windows desktops that can handle all of the major chat platforms in one app is a great tip for customer service teams, allowing even the smallest teams to monitor every channel in real-time and respond from one central place.
3. Go 24/7
Don't you just hate it when you need to contact a business, but you realize that it's 2am in the morning, and no one is going to be around to answer your query?
By going 24/7, you give your customers the option of contacting you whenever is convenient for them, which increases the likelihood that they will make purchases or sign-up for your memberships, and it increases your reputation.
Doesn't this mean working 24/7, though?
Not necessarily. It's perfectly acceptable to move your customer service response team over to a 24/7 model and still allow customers to ask questions, even if you let them know that their query may not be able to be solved until standard business hours.
Just having that first response to their query, and knowing that someone has replied straight away, is likely to be exactly what your potential customer wanted and, as a result, it will improve your customer relationship with them.
Be Authentic
One of the biggest problems for businesses that are just going digital is how to remain authentic in what can sometimes feel like a superficial world.
This is definitely a difficult topic for businesses and one that marketing teams take very seriously, but your customer service team needs to be on the same page as your marketing team to ensure that you are both giving out the same information in the same way.
Customers these days seem to see businesses as personified, which can make it very difficult for customer service teams, marketing teams, accountancy teams, and every other team in your business to act as one solid voice.
By having a strong sense of brand and strong processes when it comes to responding to questions, queries, and complaints, you are more likely to come across as the authentic business that you are, which will be a big bonus for your customers.
Businesses need to realize that they are available to customers 24x7. This means that customers might just be doing research about your brand even when you are fast asleep. What happens if they discover a negative piece of content representing your brand in a bad light?
The direct fallout might be no sales! By using a service like Repguardian reputation management, brands can address all mentions around their name on search engines and social media. This allows them to take action and ensure that their credibility is not getting affected.
4. Be Clear With Your Customers Around Timing
Just as your customers may expect you to be online 24/7, they also expect to be responded to within a certain amount of time, and their query addressed and finished within a decent amount of time.
No customer wants to be hanging around on the phone for hours on end only to find that there is no one able to answer their query.
It's for this reason that you must invest in giving customers realistic expectations when they get on to a call or a chat with your customer service team.
If your team is busy and it will take some time to respond, let your customers know. If there is no-one available right now to answer this specific question, but they will be back from lunch at 2 pm, let your customer know.
Keeping your customer in the loop about things will mean they have a much better experience of your customer service team than if you were to just palm them off with excuses about why you can't help them right now.
Being able to respond to your customer complaint or query quickly is great, but customers would prefer it if their query was answered properly, even if this may take slightly longer.
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