Providing excellent customer service is vital for every business. It makes the customer feel respected and valued. This boosts brand loyalty and increases the customer’s overall lifetime value.
But it’s more than that.
With 54% of consumers expecting better customer service today than they did a year ago, it’s vital for every organization to consistently improve its customer service efforts.
That’s why below we’ve listed four simple ways you can provide better customer service and keep your existing customers happy.
1. Be Clear About Your Proposition
Your value proposition is your promise to your customers.
It’s a statement that involves three key areas:
- Relevancy: How does your business offering solve your customers’ problems?
- Value: What benefits does your business offering provide?
- Point of Difference: What separates your business apart from the competition?
It’s why they do business with you.
If you can be clear about your value proposition, then customers know what to expect. In today’s customer-driven marketplace, consumers like transparency. If they’ve decided to buy from you, they expect you to keep your word and uphold your promise.
Lendio, a service that provides loans for small businesses, is very transparent about their value proposition:
Lendio tells customers that applying is free and will not hurt their credit score. As you can see here, they are upfront about their requirements. Being upfront allows Lendio to save the customer support team time and improve conversion rates.
2. Use a Help Desk Platform
Customers are always in need of support. But with so many channels, it’s hard to keep track of where your customers are and when they’d reach out.
Social media may have gained popularity a decade ago, but social media platforms have now become a go-to place for consumers looking for help.
But that’s not all.
Businesses not only have to be present on multiple channels like social media platforms, but they also need to respond quickly.
In 2014, an American Express Survey found that the maximum amount of time customers are willing to wait is 13 minutes. In 2017, an Arise Study shows that two-thirds of customers said they would wait two minutes or less, with 13% stating that no wait time is acceptable.
With these ever-increasing expectations, it’s crucial you respond to customers fast.
That’s why a great help desk software like Freshdesk, can help you streamline all your conversations into one place, keep track of user requests, and communicate with customers quickly and easily.
We recommend tracking your time spent on customer service.
Tracking can help you see how transparency can help reduce time spent on customer service and how it can improve your overall customer service results.
Transparency can also come in the form of using the right customer service lingo. Have a look at Nextiva’s ‘customer service phrases that can make or break your business,’ to see how you can improve communication with customers.
3. Offer Content That Solves a Problem
Begin solving your prospect’s problems through your content marketing. As a business, you have solutions to people’s problems.
So why not provide better customer service and begin earning your customer’s trust at the beginning of the marketing funnel from the very start:
Buzzsprout is a podcast hosting platform that produces blog content for podcasters. A common problem we see with podcasts is sound quality. That’s why Buzzsprout has a blog post on ‘How to Record, Edit, and Mix a Great Sounding Podcast.’
By providing helpful tips and actionable content to common problems, Buzzsprout solves user problems quickly.
4. Use FAQs to Solve Problems Before They Arise
FAQs are an excellent way for customers to help themselves.
If your customers can find the solutions to their question without needing to talk to a customer service team member, not only will you have a satisfied customer, but you can also save your support team’s time.
Have a look at Housecall Pro’s landing page for electrical contractors:
As you can see here, Housecall Pro uses many FAQs for electrical contractors to understand how the software works and which software integrations work.
If the customer hasn’t resolved their problem, there’s also a small live-chat service in the bottom right corner.
Excellent customer service is now an integral part of any successful company.
That’s why we recommend following these four tips.
Back to you
Interactions between consumers and businesses may be changing quickly, but providing a clear proposition, using a Help Desk support system, providing helpful content, and having a FAQs help page is a great start to achieving better customer service in 2019.
