The market is being ruled by ideas to improve customer experience; one must remember that Customer Service is the way through which customer experience could be improved. The maximum amount of communication a customer has with a brand is through the customer service team. Therefore, no matter how great your product, how good your marketing and outreach strategy, but if your customer service is dismal, it would definitely lead to a bad customer experience. Keeping this condition in mind, we have listed seven steps to creating a service strategy that we believe will win customers over:
Decide on Organizational Goals: Before your brand starts providing customer services, clarify your customer service goals to your employees. If your brand communicates that great customer service is a brand goal, customer service representatives would not find it much difficult to assimilate this into their behaviour and approach.
Assess Customer Needs: It is imperative that you as a brand understand your customer’s aspirations, needs, and buying pattern. Technology today has made sure that the customer leaves behind rich data. The brand has to smartly mine that data and understand the needs of the customer. A brand can conduct targeted customer research, study customer shopping patterns and create customer personas. Such knowledge could then be used by customer service providers in communicating effectively with the customer.
Social Media Strategies: The advent of social media has provided brands with an opportunity to appeal to the customer directly. This also means that customers tend to reach out to brands through social media too and expect a speedy response to their queries.
Research also shows that 57% customers expect the same response time at nights and on weekends. This goes on to show that customer expectations from brands are pretty high, which means that as a brand, you must have a dedicated team for social media which should respond promptly and politely to customer queries.Listen to the Frontline: As a brand, the failure or poor performance of your excellent customer service plan may perplex you. What you need to remember is that most of the times things that sound and look good to a brand, may not be as good an experience for the customer. To create an effective service strategy, it is necessary to listen to those who come in contact with the customer regularly. Have frequent workshops with your front end staff to understand customer pain points and devise new strategies accordingly.
Select Your Points of Pro-activity: Communicate relevant information to the customer. A proactive communication strategy would work effectively only if the customer receives relevant information. It’s as simple as that, you would appreciate it if your bank sends you relevant information on how to avoid bank frauds but you would find it irritating if Myntra’s website kept on reminding you of a web chat option, especially when you know exactly what you wish to buy.
Investing in Your Own Human Capital: As a brand, you may feel that a good strategy is enough to win over customers, however, it is not so. A good strategy requires equally capable human beings to implement them. Therefore, it is important that you as a brand invest in training your representatives. The top three qualities that a customer service provider must imbibe are Empathy, Patience, and A customer service provider must be able to walk in the shoes of the customer to understand what hurts them, he/she must also have enough patience to deal with a customer who may be a little impatient because of the issue they are facing, similarly, he/she should be smart enough to adapt to a change in the customer’s mood and answer queries accordingly.
Consistency: The biggest win for a brand is consistent customer service. As a brand, you need to understand that excellent customer service is not a one day deal. It is a consistent effort; it needs to be the same for all customers on all days. A consistent customer service encourages the customer to trust the brand, to get a sense of familiarity and ease.
