What Is Customer Service?
Customer service is the provision of service to customers before, during, and after a purchase. Companies, large and small, hire professional customer service agents to provide answers to customer questions through in-person, telephone, email, chat, and social media interactions. They can also be responsible for creating documentation for self-service support offered in kiosks, automated phone services, website FAQs, and many others.
What Is Good Customer Service?
Good customer service is not just answering the customers’ inquiries. Good customer service means providing timely, attentive, upbeat service to a customer, and also making sure the customers’ needs are met in a manner that reflects positively on the company or business. The person offering the customer support must have clear communication skills. They should be persuasive to be able to convince the inquiring person, especially if they are a prospective buyer. As a customer support offering assistance after the purchase, one should have empathy, adaptability, and the ability to use positive language in any given situation. Patient, self-control, and taking responsibility rounds up the essential traits a good customer service agent must possess.
Why Does Your Customer Service need To Be Awesome?
Do you know what your customers want? They buy your products not because they want them. They buy it because they want solutions. And they want good service that goes with it. Even in the post-pandemic era, a great customer experience is still a top must-have for consumers. According to a Consumer Experience Impact Report conducted by Harris Interactive, as much as 60% of surveyed consumers said they are willing to pay more just to have a more satisfying customer experience.
What Are Customers’ Expectations?
In this day and age of fast food and fast relief, customers want everything else fast. Like what they say: you snooze, you lose. That also applies to providing customer service. According to the White House Office of Consumer Affairs Washington, DC, companies and brands that offer immediate service in social media, live chats on website, quick responses from AI or FAQ, or provide information customers can remember after visits win the customers’ business. Some customers also preferred to have a buying or pre-buying experience without interacting with salespeople. Companies anticipate these kinds of customers and prepare for them self-serving outlets like vending machines, kiosks, automated responses on phone, even a direct customer service app that customers can access anywhere while on the go.
If served well and the company was able to address the customers’ issue, most happy customers tell 4 to 6 people about their satisfying experience, mostly their friends and family. They also post it on social media or write an article about it and publish it on their blogs or newsletters. Compared to satisfied customers, dissatisfied customers are more eager to let people know about their bad experiences. Doubling the approximate number of people, 9 up to 16 of their closest acquaintance gets to know about the company’s abysmal product and poor service.
Important Customer Service Statistics
68% of customers have quit doing business with a company because of bad customer service. According to a U.S. government study “Why Customers Stop Buying”, “PERCEIVED INDIFFERENCE”, a perceived lack of caring expressed by companies, makes customers not want to buy again from the said brand. Whether the company likes it or not, the customer thinks customer service is very much important. (Source: David Bater)
Once a customer goes through a bad or dissatisfying experience from your brand, redemption is nearly impossible, says Ruby Newell-Legner. According to her “Understanding Customers” report, it states that it takes 12 positive buying experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience. And if the customer would rather buy from somebody else after the incident, your company will no longer have the chance to redeem itself.
The number of unhappy customers who will not complain and just simply abandon your company is clocked in at 91% once they have a poor or unacceptable buying experience. Instead of wasting their time knowing their issues will not be resolved, they would rather leave and buy from your competition. A repeated offense makes this even truer. (Source: 1Financial Training services)
For every customer complaint, 26 other customers have remained silent. Meaning, for every one person who manages to point out something wrong about your products or services, there are 26 others whose patience is nearing its limit. (Source: Lee Resource Inc)
If you start your business with 400 regular customers and after 3 months passed you ended up with 380, your churn rate is 5% because you lost 5% of your customers for that given timeframe. Customer churn or attrition happens when the customer feels poor treatment or dissatisfaction with your product. It is reported that customers who experience this 7 out of 10 times find a more friendly alternative. (Source: TARP)
Learn From Big Companies
It is always said that looking for new customers is more expensive than retaining one. With that, companies come up with creative ways to retain their customers' trust and loyalty to have longer-term financial success with their customers.
Companies are making an effort to listen to the feedback of their customers. Listening to their customers’ comments makes their customers feel involved and important. Not every customer feels that surveys are annoying. When asked for an opinion on a product or experience, some of the customers feel valued and treated almost as a part of the creative team. When done right, customers feel their insight is heard and is important.
New and old companies nowadays find it crucial to be different from their competitors by offering a better customer service experience. Knowing who their competitors are, and how they treat their customers, helps them to make their products, services, and customer support truly stand out. With this knowledge, businesses create marketing strategies that take advantage of their competitors' weaknesses and improve the overall performance of the business.
90% of businesses view customer experience as important or critical. To be able to sustain the growth of any business, a remarkable customer experience is a must. A positive customer experience promotes loyalty, helps retain customers, and encourages brand advocacy. Today, customers are the king, not the sellers.
Do You Need To Invest In Good Customer Service?
Good customer service helps improve customer retention. Think of different customer retention strategies to build customer loyalty and improve customer lifetime value. Customer service booth, website FAQs, and chat support are just some of the things you can implement. By focusing on the relationships with your existing and prospective customers, you boost their loyalty to your brand.
Good customer service helps improve customer satisfaction. To give customers what they want, you have to know what they want. Listening to them, being proactive, and taking initiatives will help raise your customers' satisfaction with your products and services.
Good customer service helps increase cross-selling and upselling. A way to increase your revenue is through upselling and cross-selling your products. You won’t be able to encourage a customer to spend more money if they are already dissatisfied with your products or experienced poor treatment from your establishments. By having good customer service, you can easily persuade them to buy more from you.
Takeaways
Good customer support can take a lot of effort and each form needs to be executed well to retain existing customers or win new ones. Some of the ways to provide good customer support are through telephone, email, or chat. Here in Cube&Arrow Inc., we specialize in providing offshore customer support to small and medium-sized companies on various contact channels and platforms. Get in touch with us to discuss the best rates we can offer so you can give your customers the top-notch customer support they deserve.
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