You can have the greatest product on the market. If your customer service isn’t good, you will start losing clients. A satisfied customer confides his positive experience to around 3 people, while an angry person can share it with thousands. Around 83% of unsatisfied clients react by posting their complaints on social media. In contrast, 73% of customers claim that friendly customer support is what made them fall in love with the brand.
These findings showcase how vital the role of customer service is for your business. It impacts retention, account growth, trust, and overall satisfaction. Boosting your customer service from average to outstanding certainly won’t happen overnight. Yet, these 10 innovative customer service techniques will get you there sooner than you may expect.
Why is Customer Service Crucial For Your Company?
The interaction with agents helps to create an overall image of your brand. A lot of times, customer support is the initial encounter a client or prospect has with your company. A first impression matters, and it’s crucial to make it as positive as possible.
According to an Oracle report, 86% of clients quit doing business with a company because of a bad experience with their staff. It is estimated that on average, businesses in the USA lose more than 62 billion dollars annually due to poor customer service.
Yet, the same percentage, 86% of respondents claim that they are willing to pay more money to a company that provides outstanding support. That is approximately 7 people out of 10. Therefore, quality customer service is a great revenue generator.
3 Customer Service Tips for Your Business
Before you start to work on your support agents’ performance, here are several innovative tips that may be incorporated on the side of the company.
1 Build Contextual-based Support
Your agents need to have a full overview of your customer’s cases. When they see the cases in complexity, agents can come up with better solutions and improve customer satisfaction. Microsoft report claims that 75% of clients expect agents to already be familiar with their previous interactions.
Offer your agents helpful tools, such as call notes, contact history, or the ability to route calls to preferred agents who were previously in contact with the given client.
2 Innovate Your Channels
Follow the latest trends in customer support channels. Experience management company Walker Information made a survey with more than 300 professionals from the B2B sector. Around 68% of respondents claimed that online communities will prevail, with 63% agreeing on social media and 61% on corporate websites.
This is why you should incorporate new online channels into your customer service strategy. Find your clients where they are and offer them a convenient way of contacting you, such as Live Chat.
Upgrading those channels with modern customer feedback tools can provide invaluable insights into the customer experience. By leveraging tools like surveys, comment sections, and sentiment analysis, you can gather real-time feedback to continuously improve your services and address customer concerns promptly.
It is also crucial to innovate internal communication with new approaches. This way, you create a safe place where employees can ask questions easily and find solutions to customers’ issues. You can use Slack channels, Office Vibe polls, or forums.
3 Balance Human Touch and Automation
Unplanned churn can cause a significant loss in revenue. According to CallMiner’s report, a huge amount of people are either leaving or considering leaving companies for reasons that could have been easily avoided. Those are, for example, repetitive manual tasks.
The human touch is still important and should not be completely replaced. But if you won’t eliminate boring duties, your agents won’t feel challenged and will eventually leave you.
Using automation can eliminate repetitive tasks, boost the efficiency of your service, and reduce missed opportunities. You may, for example, use CRM integration tools to take pressure from trivial tasks off your agents’ shoulders. That allows them to work on more complex cases, such as building loyalty and relationships with customers.
10 Customer Service Tips and Tricks for Your Agents
Now that you know how to create an environment where your support team can strive, let’s take a look at qualities agents should master for the best performance.
1. Listen Actively
Listening goes beyond hearing the words another person says. It’s important to focus on the actual meaning in between the lines. Customers rarely tell you exactly what needs improvement. Your agents should not only help with specific requests but also put together a bigger picture.
Tips on how to improve listening:
- Echoing: Encourage agents to repeat the last words of the conversation in their head. This ensures active thinking and helps connect information.
- Calling blind: If possible, encourage agents to close their eyes while on the phone to focus on hearing.
- Listening indicators: From time to time, your agents can say things like “I see” or “Yes” to show genuine interest and active listening.
2. Call Customers by Their Name
Referring to clients by their names supports personalization and builds a feeling of importance. It shows that your agents consider them as individuals and know who they’re talking to. By doing so, your team leaves a great impression and builds a close relationship between handler and caller.
Tips on how to remember names:
- Connection with someone we know: Encourage agents to associate the customer’s name with someone memorable, like a friend or a character they like.
- Meet and Repeat: After introduction, agents should repeat the customer’s name in their head and mention it throughout the conversation to memorize it for future interactions.
3. Be a Copycat
Agents can try mirroring customers’ way of speaking, including their language and phrasing. This creates a feeling of mutual understanding and makes it easier to solve the issue quickly.
Another useful customer service tip is to paraphrase customers and make summaries of their issues. This shows that the agent was truly paying attention and is deeply invested in solving the issue.
4. Be Polite and Show Respect
Gratitude is what truly ensures customers that they made a good choice purchasing your product. Please and thank you are key communication factors.
Customer support often goes hand in hand with emotions. Agents should learn how to handle emotional situations politely and respectfully. They should never let their own emotions overtake the satisfaction of a customer.
Starting the conversation with a positive vibe can help beat the negativity. Encourage agents to start with a warm greeting and a smile. The smile is hearable in the tone of our voice and creates a friendly impression.
5. Be proactive
Assure that your agents are proactive towards themselves and towards clients. All quality agents should be willing to accept feedback and grow. Encourage agents to acknowledge their mistakes. If they master this, your company’s services will excel.
Clients seek companies that are proactively reaching out to them. For example, if one of your products will be temporarily unavailable or your website is out of order, customers will appreciate receiving an email to find out upfront. This tactic is better than letting them discover it themselves and receiving angry phone calls or negative reviews.
6. Know Your Product and Show It
Improve agents’ knowledge of your product and company from front to back. More knowledgeable agents are, the more competent they become. They should also be fast in providing quick answers, as customers perceive being put on hold as a source of frustration.
Make sure agents have enough technical knowledge of your own system to be efficient in problem-solving. Using an intuitive call center software like CloudTalk can help by providing all the necessary information in one place.
7. Empower, But Stay Objective
Not all clients who contact support seek help with an issue. Some of them are interested in purchasing your product and want to know more details. Agents should know how to convince prospects that your product is the best choice for them. Persuasive and compelling answers are essential.
Encourage agents to present both pros and cons of your product honestly, as it makes you more credible and trustworthy.
8. Highlight Understanding
Empathy plays a significant role in customers’ experience. Agents should know how to relate to anyone in any situation. It’s important to grasp how the customer feels and show sincere care. Empathy can make a difference between a good and bad customer experience.
Tips on how to improve empathy:
- Feel, Felt, Found: Encourage agents to use this strategy to make customers feel understood and relate to their issue.
- Heard: Listen to the customer’s issue, empathize, apologize, resolve the issue, and diagnose to prevent it from happening again.
- Pretend you are talking to yourself: Encourage agents to put themselves in the customer’s shoes and consider how they would like to be treated.
9. Develop a Conversation
Encourage agents to mix problem-solving with conversation. Customers prefer to talk to a person, not a robot. Agents should choose something relevant to discuss, either connected to the issue the customer is experiencing or the product they are purchasing. Asking customers for feedback is also essential for continuous improvement.
10. Master Communication and Writing Skills
Agents are the voice of your company, and excellent communication skills are crucial in any form. Agents should be able to present complex concepts and technical steps in an easy-to-understand manner. Writing skills are equally important, as agents need to set the right tone and mood with their written communication.
Tips for better explanation strategies:
- What? So what? Now what?: Start with the problem, continue with why it’s happening, and end with how to solve it.
- Problem – Solution – Benefit: Address the problem, offer a solution, and explain the benefit of the solution.
- ELI5 (Explain it Like I’m 5): Simplify technical terms and provide direct step-by-step instructions.
Conclusion
Exceptional customer service results require an exceptional support team. Incorporating innovative customer support techniques and providing an ideal environment for your support team to excel is the key to success. Follow these customer service tips and tricks to make customers fall in love with your brand.
An easy-to-grasp, effective virtual phone software like CloudTalk can also be of great help. It allows your agents to have all the information they need at their fingertips, making it easier to handle cases and build positive customer relationships. Try CloudTalk for free!
