Technological enlightenment, in general, has made people value conscious. It’s basically shifted the grounds of competition, outside of price, to effective customer service. When you create a better customer experience, you create a better value. And this could mean adopting new customer service tips or customer service strategies that guarantee repeat customers.
Companies that invest in bettering their customer service and raising the levels of customer confidence to stay in business longer.
They are never the ones who, due to market conditions, are forced to do flash sales in a mad rush to meet painful deadlines.
Customer engagement is all about encouraging your customers to interact and share in the experiences and to help you know how best to serve them.
With strong customer service and engagement strategy, you can be sure of repeat customers, and the result is normally business growth.
Companies that focus on customer success normally give more focus on value creation, not money extraction.
They give people something meaningful beyond sales, a superb end-to-end customer experience, useful service, and real-time customer interaction.
Looking to improve your customer service experience?
Here are nine customer service tips that guarantee repeat customer.
Customer Service tip 1 – Build an undying reputation for customer support
Building a great customer reputation starts from the point of customers believing that you care for them.
When customers are well taken care of, for instance, when you freely chat manually or on live chat system they will comfortable to interact with you and your brand.
The end result of good customer interactions is the increase in sales conversion and an excellent reputation for your brand.
You could also build this reputation through customers who express their satisfaction through testimonials.
Customer service tip 2 – Master human communication skills
These are some useful tips shared by Jeff Gardner, the customer support director at Intercom;
- Ensure it’s simple and easy. Make it easier for your customers to understand how to use the product.
- It must be effective. Understand all the do’s and don’ts about your product usage
- Authenticity counts. Ensure everyone’s is in line with your cultural beliefs.
Customer service tip 3 – Develop a customer success strategy
This is a key factor in customer service. Loni Spratt, head of Customer Service at Entelo, created an effective customer service strategy and these are some tips he had to share.
- Understand and prioritize your immediate needs. Is it renewals, onboarding or expansion?
- Develop a team and build strategies.
Customer Success Tip 4 – Hire great support team
Five key traits check out when hiring a customer success agent;
- Adaptability/ Availability. If your first customer success person is unable to adapt quickly and successfully, they won’t succeed. And also, what time do they devote to their job?
- How Resilient? New customers have high expectations and require lots of hand-holding, so there are a lot of ups and downs to navigate.
- Empathy. A good employee must know how to show empathy. They should listen and understand what customer are saying to manage their pains and ease the difficulty. Not ignore or yell at them.
- Time consciousness. You must employ a successful agent who values time. There should be time to work and time to relax. And when it is time to relax, allow them to relax and be refreshed, and make sure they do it routinely.
- Good working experience. You should endeavor to employ employee with some level of experience. Employ someone with valuable skills in customer success.
Customer service tip 5 – be transparent and honest with your customers
If there’s one thing, customer’s love so much is transparency. When you are honest and show high levels of transparency with your customers, you definitely building a relationship.
One of the ways to build this transparency is by sharing your customer service ideas and strategies freely with your customers.
It doesn’t just stop here, feel free to share everything from the payment systems to refund policies.
Customer service tip 6 – Seek for Feedback
It’s feedback that will let you know what you are doing right or wrong. You need to provide an avenue for customers to provide their feedback. This could be through a phone call or the follow-up emails. It’s a great way to improve your customer service performance
Customer service tip 7 – Be very generous
Generosity is a great virtue of great brands. It takes nothing to be generous. Just the ability to know when you are wrong, how to calm customers and offer to help them.
Empathizing, being respectful and sincere to your customers are basis acts of generosity to your customers.
Be generous with apologies – You should know the right time to render your apology without the customer feeling further aggrieved. Besides, our apologies should be timely.
You can offer apologies in different ways, of course, these largely depend on the situation. Here are a few picks.
“I sincerely apologize for your disappointment with the purchase, we will work to resolve your issue as fast as possible”.
“I completely apologize our product did not meet your expectations. We shall work with you to ensure your pain is resolved.”
Be a problem solver
When issues arise on sales, be proactive enough to tackle the issue with ease. Please keep in mind you are running a business so do not compensate unnecessarily just because you want to please your customers.
For instance, if your customers purchase delays by a day, do not offer to send another product. However, purpose to use your customer service skills to make your customer understand the reason why the delivery might have delayed.
In a nutshell, do not hurt your ROI while raising your customer service game
Customer service tip 8 – Build up a customer success strategy
This is a key factor in customer service. Loni Spratt, Customer Success head at Entelo, created an effective customer service tips and these are some strategies she had to share.
- Understand and prioritize what you need most. Is it onboarding, expansion or renewals?
- Create a team and develop strategies.
Customer Success Tip 9 – Hire great support team
Five key traits you must look out for while hiring a customer success agent
- Adaptability/ Availability. Your customer success person should be quick to adapt to their roles and align with the company’s customer service policy.
- How Resilient? You should hire people who can happily assist new customers who are sometimes fussy or notorious, without complaining.
- They need to empathize. A good employee must know how to show empathy – give an ear to their customer’s difficulties without shunning them down. Not ignore or yell at them.
- Time consciousness. You must employ a success agent who value time. There should be time to work and time to relax. However, when it is time to relax, ensure you allow your agents to relax and be refreshed.
- Good working experience as Customer service tips. Requires that you endeavor to employ employee with some level of experience. Employ someone with valuable skills in customer success.
Customer service tips 10 – Transparency will let you keep more customers
All good relations are built on transparency, your relation and your customers is no exception Work hard to establish and build some transparency with your customers.
It also important to have healthy conversations about the ideas and strategies so you and your customers can foster growth.
For seller brands this translates, being open about everything including the most essential of all – payments and return policies.