Customer experience has been a buzzword for years, and it is hard to understate its importance for running a successful business. Statistics published by Finances Online show that for every dollar invested in customer support, companies can expect a return of $3.
Customer service is about more than keeping customers happy. It is about creating brand loyalty and consequently improving turnover and profit for the business in the long term. Satisfied customers may turn into brand ambassadors who refer others. In fact, it is important to try and create extremely happy customers for your business. Research shows that “totally satisfied customers” may “contribute 2.6 times as much revenue as somewhat satisfied customers”.
How to improve customer experience
With that in mind, here are five ways that will help you build customer service strategies and improve your customer experience.
Make it easy for customers to contact your business
Most people are leading busy lives, and your customers will be no exception to that. Making it easy for them to contact you with questions or problems is one of the best ways to ensure your clients are happy. This also allows you to collect data to manage customer experience in the best way possible.
Being contactable starts with the design of your website. Most websites have a contact us page and a contact us form, and both are essential. However, expecting your customers to spend time searching for ways to contact you will be counterproductive. Create as many shortcuts throughout your website as possible to allow customers to contact you easily. Hipporello Sevice Desk allows you to build, and publish contact us forms on user portals or embed them to your website in the best way possible to make your business easily reachable.
In addition, placing links on your social media platforms and including them in user manuals will benefit your customer experience. If your business uses printed materials, consider creating a QR code that links your audience directly to a contact form.
Be consistent in your communications across all channels
Consistency is the key to success in many aspects of a business. Customer support and communications are no exception to that.
Establishing and maintaining a consistent voice for your organization is important. Depending on your business this may be friendly and personal, or more formal. Above all, your tone needs to be consistent.
Making sure your team members are familiar with your brand’s voice requires education and orientation when new hires start. Understanding the specific ways of your organization does not need to be time-consuming.
Hipporello Service Desk offers a convenient quick text function, which allows customer service agents to reply to customers with previously agreed-upon messages.
The Quick Text feature gives new staff the confidence that they are responding in the most appropriate manner. It also ensures that time is saved that would otherwise be spent typing out messages.
Your staff can concentrate on solving the customer’s query rather than spending time on their keyboard.
Pay attention to customer feedback
Customer feedback in any form is invaluable, and the old saying of ‘the customer is always right’ still holds some value. Of course, everyone prefers to receive positive comments. However, we often learn more from suggestions for improvement and similar comments.
Apart from publicly available reviews and ratings, your organization’s customer support tickets are a great way of assessing how your clients feel about you. You will also be able to see how your support staff interacts with customers.
Trello’s Kanban app makes easy work of that. You have access to an end-to-end view of your data. Seeing the type of support requested and questions asked may prompt ideas for further knowledge bases or blog articles. More importantly, you may be able to spot problems early and prevent their escalation.
Listen to your employees
Virgin founder Richard Branson famously advised business leaders to“take care of [their] employees and they’ll take care of your business”. Listening to your employees is part of that care.
There are two main reasons for scheduling developmental and feedback sessions with customer service staff more frequently. First, you will notice bottlenecks in your customer service delivery early. This enables you to take action before customers even notice. Your customer service process will improve every time this happens.
Second, you receive real-time feedback on recurring issues and understand how these issues translate into customer support tickets. With this in mind, your team can start solving these problems without delay. This also means you reconsider your customer experience metrics and take actions accordingly.
Use Service Desk for Trello
To handle all the customer communication and improve the customer experience, you'll need a robust service desk. Hipporello Service Desk provides an end-to-end solution to collect customer requests, resolve issues and turn them into insights. Service Desk runs on Trello, which allows the customer experience team to easily manage requests collaboratively by dragging and dropping Trello cards (in other words customer requests) between lists in a Kanban view. Agents can respond to customers directly from the cards without switching tools and thanks to that, all the necessary information is kept in the same place.
Conclusion:
You are consistently improving the customer experience your organization delivers by solving the root causes of potentially negative customer experiences.
Happy customers are likely to turn into loyal, repeat customers. By improving their experience, you’re also improving your business. Some of them may recommend your businesses, others simply return to purchase from you again and again. The impact on your company’s bottom line cannot be understated. It is worth investing time and resources into developing the best possible customer experience.
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