Customer satisfaction can grow or wane dramatically anytime there is a need to interact with your company. Over 90 per cent of customers are using more than one support channel to reach out, so it's more important than ever for brands to be omnipresent. One-size-fits-all customer support and contact is a relic of the past. You want to make sure your brand has full integration of self-service methods and options in order to contact your support, sales, or community teams.
Put contact information in your social media profiles
Seems like a no-brainer, but many brands neglect to provide full contact information on their social media profiles. You want to include a website URL, physical or mailing address, phone number, support email address, and links to other social networks. In addition, don't neglect to fill in information about your brand, what you sell, and what makes your organization special.
Yes, your phone number is still critical
In a world with lots of contact options, phone numbers are still mandatory. People still want to reach a person over the phone for that one-on-one connection. Not to mention, phone numbers serve as a trust signal for brands.
Put a contact form on your site
Make it easy for people visiting your site to reach out by using a prominent contact form. An added bonus is that contact forms can be designed to require customers to give you specific information to better help them. If your brand's support has the right information, customers' issues or questions will get resolved even faster.
Add live chat to your site
Live chat may be the ultimate in immediate outreach, and can be implemented on any or all of your webpages. Not only does it provide an easy, quick solution to customers seeking answers, but live chat can also be used proactively to either reach out to customers or deliver important messages about your products or company.
Try SMS
Many people prefer texting to making calls on their smart phones. For brands that want to take the next technological leap, providing customer support and help over SMS can make you a trendsetter.
Got enterprise packages? Add sales team information
If you're selling to enterprise clients, your brand's sales team likely crafts custom packages for them. Make it easy for these customers to contact the appropriate people.
Host documentation, FAQs, videos, and other helpful information
Save your support team’s time by providing documentation and other information for them to link to for customers. But even better, by hosting on your site, especially in the form of a knowledge base, you enable customers to find it for themselves—which means they'll be even happier. This kind of FAQs can also help your brand with content marketing and search engine optimization goals.
Use easy “cancel” buttons
Make it easy for customers to cancel their subscriptions or orders. Don't hide or bury this information on your site. Money can be a touchy subject that causes stress, which means when customers reach out to a support department in order to cancel because they couldn’t on a site, their moods may already be on alert and distrustful of the brand. This creates trickier and more sensitive customer interactions. Instead, make it easy to cancel—and enjoy a more trusting relationship with your customers.
Have clear return policies
Similarly, if you're a B2C retailer, provide clear and consistent return policies and procedures. The best processes are always when customers can simply help themselves.
Offer big, bold logins
So many companies are focused on acquiring and signing up new members that they forget to make it obvious where returning customers sign in. Make those logins obvious—especially since logging in makes it easier for you to get to know each individual customer, and may make it easier for both your brand and the customer to report on and solve any issues or questions.
Create centralized, internal feedback loops
Customer service and community teams are on the front lines, communicating daily with customers. For true customer satisfaction, you need to improve your brand's offerings, products, and more. This means you need to bring feedback to the entire company as a way to give advice and help create long-term solutions. Creating processes around this will take your customer service to the next level. Be your customers' champion by surfacing critical needs and requests to the entire company.
By allowing your customers to contact you easily across a variety of channels and making ways to connect on your site much easier, you'll build up your brand's equity and reputation. Customers will feel more comfortable with your brand, and they’ll likely want to spend more money and time with you—especially as your brand takes the next steps to quickly work through their questions and issues, and of course, solve problems.
For more ways to make your customer service experience even better, download our free e-book, available through the link below.
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