Empowering your support team with the tools can be one of the best customer support tips bringing in benefits such as:
- Address customer queries with prompt response and boost their satisfaction level.
- Engage customers across social media channels faster to show your customer that is valuable to you.
- Handle your customer requests 24×7 for common queries and reduce the number of support tickets.
- Collect real-time feedback and know the areas where improvement is needed to build a stronger brand.
4. Start Measuring your Customer Service Efforts
One of the most important things that you need to keep your eyes on is to measure the productivity of your customer service efforts.
You have to quantify the efforts of your customer service team with metrics. Optimize every customer conversation and gauge an insight into employees’ performance.
The key KPIs to measure customer service efforts are as follows:
- Check the volume of ticket backlog – refer to the number of ticket requests you get in a day – check if you have enough support agents to deal with your ticket volumes.
- Check resolution rate – see how many requests get resolved in a day – evaluate the complexity of each request – see if you can automate the resolution process of some tickets to save your agents time.
- Check average reply time – see if the customers are following up on customer requests in a timely manner – set a response time criteria and see how much a customer has to wait to receive a response.
Best practices
- Define your core customer service metrics, and evaluate what matters to you.
- Learn the common queries or tickets and work on them- Convert the learnings into helpful content, add more resources and fix the issues
- Work on agents’ communication or internal processes to make metrics better
- Review it regularly with team
5. Break Down on Organization Silos to Deliver Consistent Service
Silos restrict clarity across organizations, Due to silos an organization cannot share information among departments or collaborate on common issues.
Here are some tips and tricks that will help you break organizational silos to help your team to work towards a single customer service goal.
- Define a customer service process and regulate them across organizational silos.
- Break down the information silo among the department by unifying customer data and conversations in one place.
- Break down the organizational silo by allowing teams to collaborate on customer requests.
- Enable your team to carry private conversations with other team members.
- Outline service goals and measure them across departments.
6. Create an Awesome First-Time User Experience
The first few seconds of your product experience will define whether your audience will stick around or not.
According to sources “On average, an app loses 77% of its daily active users within the first 3 days after the install”
It’s simple: they will quit if they have a poor first user experience.
However, let’s first understand what indicates a poor first-user experience.
Check the activation rate, you may be acquiring hundreds of users in a day but many of them might have deactivated their accounts or uninstalled your product. The activation rate indicates the percentage of users who are actively using your product.
A low activation rate indicates a poor first-user experience.
Here is how you can fix your first user experience process
- Enable your agents to be proactive and give them the necessary tools to anticipate
- customer’s needs so that they can engage them at a deeper level.
- Track your user’s journey and identify the stage where they have stopped using your product.
- Ask why they have stopped using your product, you may not get answers from every user but a lot of them are ready to share their experience.
- Identify common and repetitive issues that your customer faces in their first interaction and fix them.
- Make your trial or demo product absolutely bug-free.
- Reduce customer efforts to the minimum like if you are offering a marketplace, make product uploading and create a store an effortless process.
7. Practice Effective Customer Service Communication
Communicating clearly and effectively can reduce your customer service efforts. It gives your customers the confidence that they will be heard whenever they reach you.
94% of customers will recommend a brand whose customer service communication, they rate as “very good.”
During customer service interactions, communication means everything.
Whether a customer needs help with a product purchase or is completely frustrated to the point of leaving the brand, customer service agents need to use the right skills to connect with customers and make them calmer, satisfied and confident in the brand.
Here are some of the excellent customer tips for employees to foster better communication
- Practice clarity – Listen before your talk, ask questions like why and how to fully understand the customer context – give customers a brief about your understanding of their requirements.
- Be concrete yet concise – give a clear picture to a customer about what you want to convey, share your screen, send images, or conduct live chat to convey your message effectively.
- Involve other team members – Encourage your team to participate like a developer to instantly check on the feasibility of customer expectations. Optimize fully on the first few customer interactions.
- Share information updates – Make a habit of briefing everything in text form and share it with a customer via email or messages.
- Use the right tone or attitude – Your tone should not be too friendly nor you should sound like a robot, be patient and persistent during the call.
8. Collect Customer Feedback Regularly
Customer feedback is very important because it tells you how they feel about your business. You come to know what they like about you and areas where you can stand to improve.
70% of consumers say they’re highly likely to purchase exclusively from brands that understand them.
Qualified feedback can help you build customer loyalty. There are many tried and tested ways to get customer’s feedback while keeping them engaged.
Here are some very effective ways of getting quality customer feedback.
- Seek feedback on different communication sources like a live chat – just like e-mail surveys, you can seek feedback after a live chat session has closed.
- Provide a dedicated customer feedback form on your site, In-app, or product page. Make use of specialized customer feedback services like NPS.
- Conduct personal interviews – take criticism with the right attitude – make a point of every word the customer says and reward them for their valuable time.
- Take bad reviews seriously – The bad reviews you receive on online review platforms can be the most honest and useful pieces of information you can have to improve customer service.
- Activate social listening – social media sites such as Facebook, and Twitter Social can be an invaluable resource for customer feedback. You can make use of a variety of tools to monitor and collect customer feedback from your social channels.
9. Bring Agility in your Customer Service Tips
Moving with agility in customer support means being able to pivot quickly and meet customer needs as they fluctuate. The most agile customer support teams are able to function as such because they have the following: a customer-first mentality, and empowered & experienced agents.
If your customer service agents’ efforts are agile they will be responsive to change and less likely to be stubborn towards processes. They will value individuals more than the specified processes.
It also helps your team to collaborate on customer issues like negotiation, escalation, or violation of any SLA. Moreover, agile streamlines the communication flow between the customer and your team, they help your team build documents that are focused on every aspect of software development.
10. Go the Extra Mile in your Customer Service
Never think twice about going the extra mile for your customers. This is how as a small business you can differentiate from big players.
Going that extra mile in your customer service means exceeding your customer expectations.
It can be as simple as spending extra time to help a customer make the right selection or being sensitive to their every need.