8 of the Best Ways to Improve Your Customer Service and Boost Sales

They need to think about the company as a whole and how certain changes will influence the business over time. This can make it easy for upper management to lose sight of the customer experience and put customer needs on the backburner as they try to solve other problems for the business. Community forums are great because they bring customers together and form a digital community for your brand. For example, HubSpot’s community forum is a place where HubSpot customers can get together and discuss different ways to use the brand’s products. They can submit ideas for new product features and offer workarounds to other customers who may be encountering similar challenges. Not only does this help customers find solutions to problems, but it also fosters a community that’s loyal to the HubSpot brand.

• Customer care is on the cusp of a technology explosion that will greatly enhance frontline capabilities.
• I think many of us can sense when someone is unhappy or doesn’t want to be helping us — don’t let this happen in your customer service.
• Responding that quickly can be difficult, especially if you’re managing multiple social media platforms and company inboxes.
• First, you should approach each conversation to learn something and focus on the speaker.

She is often writing case studies, help documentation, and articles about customer support. Her writing has helped businesses to attract curious audiences and transform them into loyal advocates. When you break your word, like saying you’ll get back to a customer within 24 hours and you don’t, offer something to make up for it.

User Flows: 8 Tips For Creating A Super Smooth User Experience

But when you’re small — just a person or two — the leverage you get from support is by delivering amazing service and experiences that differentiate you from your competitors, not by doing a ticket 2% faster. While you’re small, fix your eyes on your customer and their success, not on your systems and your efficiency. When you’re in the founding stage of your company (with somewhere around 0-5 employees), customer support is far from your number one priority. When dealing with your customers at this stage, you need to be thinking through the lens of product-market fit. I grew with the team and played a big role in many of our successes … and failures, which I’ll also take full credit for.

Invest in the tools to get customers to the right team member, right away. Your customers will be happy not to wait on hold, only to reach someone who redirects their call anyway. Porch, a service that connects homeowners to professionals that help them improve their home, is avoiding those kinds of timing issues by using the right communication platform. From when they call in, to how they like to communicate with support staff, the numbers can teach you a lot about the best way to serve your customers.

Another way to provide efficient customer service is by anticipating problems before they occur, which saves the customer from having to reach out with questions. Using customer analytics is a great way to assess your client base so you can strategize accordingly. When you’re considering what customer service structure is best for your business, evaluate the pros and cons of outsourced customer service. You may want to be more hands-on, or you may find that it’s worth it to hand off this aspect to a call center. Your service team should be able to empathize and be understanding of the customer’s pain points. No one-size-fits-all customer service strategy works for everyone or delivers extraordinary customer service.

Case Studies of Successful Customer Service Transformations

Customer satisfaction directly affects your bottom line, and if you want to increase sales or maintain your current customers, it’s critical that you understand what they care about most. Having your agents set their own goals empowers solutions to improve customer service them to take true ownership and achieve them. This feeling of accomplishment translates into more engagement and higher productivity. Your team’s customer service performance goals then align with the company’s goals naturally.

That’s because the chatbots of yesterday did not fulfill their promise and were not powered by the appropriate technology—they were much more artificial than intelligent. And when your customers are also investors, you don’t want to leave them waiting on hold. By using live reporting data, the service team is able track call volume in real time.

As the pandemic created stock-outs, order cancellations and difficult in-person shopping conditions, it disrupted the normal customer experience and, as a result, customer loyalty slipped. During holidays or product launches, you may experience a customer service surge where the volume of your support cases rises significantly. At these times, it can be tempting to focus on solving as many cases as possible instead of thoroughly working through each issue.

This type of company culture leads to improved team spirit which translates to better performance and more satisfied customers. Even difficult conversations with customers will be easier and more productive if the customer feels more comfortable. Encourage your agents to uphold this culture and you’ll receive the real feedback that will help you and your team learn and improve performance. Now that you know how to improve customer service, learn about the technology solutions that will help your team resolve customer concerns even faster. Customers may come to you with all types of problems and they want their questions answers fast. If you don’t know how to properly implement a service ticket, you’ll be wasting their valuable time.

Key Customer Service Skills (and How to Develop Them)

Your brick-and-mortar stores aren’t the only places where customers interact with your business. With social media, ecommerce, and third-party review sites, customers can engage your company through a variety of digital mediums. Your business will reap a number of payoffs from efficient customer service – five, in particular. Customers feel appreciated if you make them valued members of your community. You can create communities through trade shows, social media, interactive websites, webinars, etc. These help customers learn about you, and you get to learn as much from them.

• RingCentral automatically routes prospect calls to a Phase 1 team of experts and sends overflow calls to second, third, and fourth-level teams—eliminating the need to pay for a third-party call center.
• It starts with strong leadership support, where leaders champion customer satisfaction as a top priority.
• Listening increases the chances that you’ll hear your customers’ real problems and can effectively solve them, resulting in happier customers.
• Innovating the customer experience means adding more value to the customer’s relationship with your business.

While still an emerging platform, TikTok can be a valuable tool for customer service innovation as its native features help connect customers seeking support from their favorite brands. TikTok below is from Topicals, a skincare company that created a video response to a question someone left in the comment section. Innovating the customer experience means adding more value to the customer’s relationship with your business. While there are many ways to do this, these efforts should generally foster a stronger connection with your customer base by offering products, rewards, and services that your competitors can’t.

It’s their job to create positive interactions; it’s management’s job to find solutions that improve productivity, whether that means adopting customer service technology or rethinking internal support strategies. It revamped existing channels, improving straight-through processing in self-service options while launching new, dedicated video and social-media channels. To drive a personalized experience, servicing channels are supported by AI-powered decision making, including speech and sentiment analytics to enable automated intent recognition and resolution.

One option is to use software built to reduce tedious tasks, calculate trends, or automate your reports. We’re talking shout conversational intelligence, that – no matter the platform customers talk to or about you on – can clue you in on what they need and how they feel. It took years of practice and he was even a backup quarterback before he earned the starting position. And now, even though he’s a Super Bowl-winning quarterback, he continues to eat nutritious food, watch game tapes, and receive feedback from his coaches. If you’re working in a customer-facing service role and want to excel in your work, these are for you.

Adopt free customer service tools.

Live chat and social media interactions are the top ways to be available for your customers all the time. No matter how much your business may rely on automations, such as artificial intelligence (AI), continuing to employ actual staff members who can help is a crucial piece of the customer service puzzle. Your team has to be provided with the training and resources that they will need to deliver the best possible customer service experience. Providing excellent customer service sounds so simple but it’s quite difficult to do. Businesses make customer service mistakes for many reasons, from inadequate tools and training to not understanding what customers need. The quality of your service has a direct, often swift, influence on the success or failure of your brand.

If customers don’t feel that they are being heard and that their patronage is important to you, they will likely take their business elsewhere. A key value of support that many growing companies miss is that it gives you an incredibly accurate pulse on what your customers want from you. Most startups listen to their market to determine what to build; this is often led by the sales people or CEO, who can be very loud voices for a product development team. For instance, their brick-and-mortar store employees are also fully trained on their products, so when call center wait times get too long, they can log in remotely and start answering customer questions. Plus, supervisors could now monitor support calls, jump in to solve complex issues, and identify opportunities for improvement—ultimately, creating a better customer experience. Luckily, through integrations, they’re able to deliver quality customer service—fast—simply by making sure their team has all of the information they need at their fingertips.

And whether your business operates on a subscription model or relies on referrals (or wants to get more repeat purchases), good customer service is almost always crucial to your bottom line. Plus, without the information they needed on their call data, they also faced issues in both over- and understaffing their call center. Because they use a phone system that gives them the same business number for voice calling and texting (RingCentral), customers can easily send these kinds of quick questions via SMS. Inevitably, there are a range of customers that come through any support channel, from big, complicated questions to quick and easy ones. When your customers call, you need to make sure that whoever picks up the phone has the information they need to answer their questions.

Loyalty programs add value after a purchase is made, keeping your brand relevant even when the customer doesn’t need to buy one of your products. What he found was a company that had revolutionized the customer experience to revolve around efficiency and product quality. The building was customized to fit the natural workflow of the employees and the milkshake machines were churning out 40 milkshakes at a time, constantly. One of the best ways to achieve increased performance is to solve all the customer’s problems the first time. Calculating and tracking your First Contact Resolution score (FCR) will help you understand the importance of spending extra time upfront to provide a quality reply the first time.

Empathy is the ability to understand how the customer is feeling and where they’re coming from. While some people seem like they’re born with this trait, it’s a skill that can be acquired. When listening to the customer, try to see the problem through his eyes and imagine how it makes him feel. This is an important customer service skill because the customer will be more receptive if they feel understood by you. It can also de-escalate a conflict and create a more enjoyable interaction with your company.