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Relationships can be tough – especially customer-to-company relationships. The gap between customers’ expectations and the service they receive is widening as today’s solutions and smart objects become even faster.
This Valentine’s Day, I am going to make it easy for you and share five things consumers love about amazing customer support.
This should be a given because when we play the role as the customer, we all love fast, efficient service from a company. However, in many ways, a fast support resolution determines the overall experience. In a recent study of more than 7,000 US consumers, Forrester Research found that 71% said that valuing their time was the most important thing that a company could do to provide them with good customer service.
I can give you all of the best tools and secrets to providing fast customer service, however none of it will mean anything with the wrong hires and lack of training. In order for support agents to solve problems fast and efficiently, they need to be the right people and trained to know the product or service better than the guys who made it. At Desk.com, all of our Customer WOW agents are professionals that know code and understand the product backwards and forwards. As soon as a customer case enters their queue, they most likely know the answer to the problem within a matter of seconds - no scouring through an internal knowledge base or spending time asking a colleague for help.
Customers expect to be able to start a conversation in one support channel (such as email or phone) and continue it in another without having to restart the conversation or repeat their problem. This expectation has grown over the years as more and more customers have become impatient with customer support and more communication channels have opened up, most notably, social media.
Invest in a customer service app, such as Desk.com. It is very difficult for support teams to provide consistent customer experiences working off of a fragmented system with no customer information. Customer support solutions such as Desk.com pull incoming customer cases from various channels into one Universal Inbox making it easy for the support agent to understand his/her workload at a glance. Customer information and past orders are also available within the app so a customer can start a conversation on the phone with one agent and have it resolved - without ever having to restart the conversation - with another agent over email.
Many of today’s businesses have lost the art of the human touch. Gone are the days when we preferred to purchase from the mom-and-pop store around the corner because the people behind the counter knew us by our first name and what our preferences were. However, the need for a personalized experience has not been diminished – customers still crave that human touch of being known by the businesses that they purchase from.
Start by empowering your agents with responsibilities and the right tools. Doing so will motivate your employees to be engaging and fun to customers. Also, make sure to provide them with the right tools so that they can see past interactions or order history from the customer.
Customers want to help themselves. They are more technically savvy with a shorter patience for customer support and have come to prefer solving their issues and answering their own questions. In fact, according to Forrester Research, 72% of customers prefer self-service to resolve their support issues to picking up the phone or sending an email.
Build an online support center! If you already have one, strive to always update and refresh the knowledge base content. A good rule of thumb is to hold content meetings regularly to make sure articles don't go stale.
Note: download the WOW Guide to Self-Service Support.
What exactly is a moment of WOW? It is an action taken by a support agent to which they go above and beyond the call of service to make a customer happy. Whether it is a free return or discount due to a misunderstanding, customers love to be surprised with extreme acts of kindness.
Desk.com’s customer, Chubbies – provider of men’s shorts – has established themselves as having amazing customer service. Here is what co-founder, Tom Montgomery says about how they grow their business through incredible customer support:
“One of best ways to get our brand across is to talk to our customers in a way that feels natural to us and fun to them. We hope they never have reservations about contacting or ordering with us - we want them to know that if something should ever go wrong with an order, they will be 100% taken care of.”
This call to action must come from the top down. Many of Desk.com’s customers that are known for providing moments of WOW to their customers have done so because they established a company culture that was promoted and encouraged it.
Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Hugs_Campaign
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