The importance of customer services cannot be overlooked in today’s digital age. However, the experts agree that it is one of the most difficult steps to achieve even for established names in any industry.
The reason is simple.
People want to be heard and responded to. If you don’t respond to their queries, someone else would. This is because it’s so much easier to find similar businesses nowadays that people don’t just rely on a single brand anymore.
However, you can still become your customers’ first preference simply by empowering your customer services team. With the right tools in place and a strategy to implement, this step can bring huge success to your brand.
Let’s find out how.
1. Increased Number of Happy Customers
When you empower your customer services team with the right tools and training materials, they are able to assist your customers in the best possible way. The result is increased customer satisfaction and more people who would be interested in your services or products.
Customers often decide to reach out to support personnel when they either have an emergency or a bad experience to report. Imagine if your business was able to dissipate a tense situation by offering a discount coupon or some other incentive and the customer ended the chat on a happy note.
Happy customers will not only become your mouthpiece for word-of-mouth marketing but will also have a higher lifetime value (LTV). To ensure you have happy customers at the end of the day, your customer services team should be able to identify the customer’s needs, show personal interest in their concerns, and are capable of going above and beyond.
And this is possible only when you have a strategy to empower your customer services personnel.
2. Better Insights Into Customer Behavior
Call center agents that directly deal with customers on a day-to-day basis have a clear understanding of the most common problems your customers are facing. Empowering these agents will help you get more useful insights into these issues so you could take steps to fix them.
Rackspace is an example of a successful brand with a revenue run rate of more than $1 billion and most part of this success is attributed to its excellent customer service. They call their customer support department Fanatical Support. The five elements at the core of their team are Responsiveness, Ownership, Resourcefulness, Expertise, and Transparency.
3. Reduced Number of Disgruntled Customers
Dealing with displeased customers is not an easy job and at times it can become absolutely draining. The role of a customer service rep is something that needs regular appreciation and approval from the higher-level employees and executives.
If you want to reduce the number of unhappy and disgruntled customers, you will have to train your call center agents to show patience under all circumstances. And to appreciate their efforts, recognize their hard work and praise them in front of others. This will further boost their motivation and they will better report on customer feedback, especially the negative ones.
An empowered team will be able to boost your customer satisfaction rate and serve to retain more loyal customers. All this effort will eventually improve your company culture as a whole where tolerance and patience are shown at every stage of the process.
Conclusion
No matter what your business strategy is, the only way to achieve customer satisfaction is to deliver great customer service. Period.
Focus on empowering your customer services team to achieve your business goals in a shorter span of time than you would otherwise expect. Even if it means being obsessed with your customers, don’t hesitate to go the extra mile as it will pay off hugely in the long run.
Look at how other successful brands are doing it to get an idea about how important it really is to have happy and satisfied customers at the end of the day.