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Customer service experience

This is an adaptation for Brazil of an article found on the website www.toolbox.com, written by Lipi Khandelwal and duly authorized by editor-in-chief Chitra Iyer, to whom I am very grateful for the partnership. Although extensive, this reading is strongly recommended as it deals with an article specific to the customer service experience, not the customer experience.

Customer service experience is a customer’s perception or opinion about the company’s support during the purchasing and post-purchase cycle. A customer’s overall experience is measured by interaction with a company’s sales, support, and service teams during and after a purchase.

Sales and marketing can help you sell more, but a good service experience is the magnet that will keep your customers returning and bringing you more customers. Experience can make or break a business and is one of the most critical elements in long-term retention.

In this article, we’ll discuss what customer service experience means, why it’s essential for a business, and strategies for improving it.

Let’s now find out what the customer service experience is and how you can improve it!

What is customer service experience?

Customer service experience is a customer’s overall experience with a company’s sales, support, and service teams before, during, and after a purchase.

Whether on the phone or in person, in-store, on social media or in a service center, every interaction a customer has with a company contributes to a good or bad experience. From when someone is researching or exploring a specific product they want to buy, to when someone purchases something, from guiding them to find the most suitable product to instructions on how to use it, solving problems, everything comes under customer service.

Whether a customer feels satisfied and returns to a brand over time or moves away, whether they recommend it to a friend or leave critical reviews for everyone, depends on the service experience a company provides. It’s the only way to protect a customer, build loyalty, set the stage for repeat purchases, and ensure good word-of-mouth publicity. And as we all know, retaining a customer in the long term is much more economical than acquiring new ones.

For example, someone calls a telecommunications provider’s customer service number about a specific problem with their current phone bill. Instead of asking the customer for all their identity details and keeping them on hold for several minutes, the call operator quickly validates two random pieces of information and then immediately offers a solution to the current problem, making the customer feel at ease. As? Integrations, automation, alerts, and a user-friendly interface.

If the problem was an invoice error, the operator can instantly rectify and reissue your invoice. Additionally, it sends the customer a compensatory credit for the next billing cycle as an apology for the inconvenience caused by the error in the billing process. This is a good service experience.

Here are some of the crucial ingredients you can’t miss in your customer service efforts:

• Ease of access to the service
• Speed ​​of customer response
• Efficiency in problem-solving
• Resolution effectiveness
• Friendliness of human or bot agents
• Friendly user interface (whether on screen or in call)
• Publish feedback and service follow-up

Indeed, longer-lived and more expensive consumer goods require a greater focus on the service experience. For example, when buying a car, before making a purchase, in addition to the price, design, model, features, etc., you certainly check the service experience reviews, service guarantee, maintenance expenses, and so on.

Focusing on providing an excellent customer service experience has many business benefits. Let’s find out why this is so important.

Why is the customer service experience significant?

4 main benefits for companies

The type of customer service experience a company provides determines its customers’ long-term satisfaction and loyalty. It is also an important factor in customer base growth and overall profitability.

A 2018 PwC study, titled ‘Experience is Everything’, noted that even if they love a brand or product, 47% of people in Brazil say they would stop buying from a company after a single negative experience; 40% also indicate a little more persistence and would stop buying after a few negative experiences. In other words, experience is fundamental to the success of the business!

Key Business Benefits of Customer Service Experience

Here are the top 4 benefits that businesses are sure to witness as a result of an excellent customer service experience.

1. Building trust and relationships with customers

An extraordinary customer service experience is essential to exceeding your customers’ expectations. When you make customers feel valued and support them throughout their purchasing journey, you set yourself up for customer satisfaction.

Additionally, this establishes trust in your customers as they better associate with a brand or company that makes them feel good. This results in long-lasting relationships between a brand and its customers. In the coming years, customer relationships will be based on trust, authenticity, and relationships. In addition to acquiring a new customer, the service experience is the only guaranteed opportunity for the brand to build this trust and relationship as a differentiator.

2. Build loyal promoters and positive word-of-mouth.

Today, companies operate in a more dynamic and disruptive environment than ever before, with customers exposed to multiple options and choices in almost every domain. With social media being a central playing field for potential and existing customers, bad news arrives faster than ever. On the other hand, satisfied customers tend to act as loyal brand advocates on social media.

“Word of mouth” travels faster than any advertisement; therefore, a happy customer is always your best promoter. While a failed customer service experience can result in negative publicity for a brand, a satisfied customer will remain loyal and bring in new customers.

3. Building a strong brand differentiator.

Companies that focus more on the customer service experience and have a great product always have an advantage over their competitors. Today, consumers have more options with multiple brands or companies offering similar products or services. This market expansion has changed how customers make purchase decisions, with service as important as product quality and price. For example, why would a business traveller prefer one hotel over another, considering they both have great rooms and similar prices? The traveller chooses according to the general and often intangible experience.

If you deliver just one bad experience to a customer, they might switch to another brand. However, by providing excellent customer service, you can outperform your competition and achieve consistent customer retention.

4. Build better products and services.

Customer service reports and records are an excellent source of insights into the customer journey, customer pain points, and product or service usage patterns. Fitting and channelling that vision into product or service design can help create a more competitive offering and directly contribute to savings, incremental revenue, or even market-moving innovations. Structured and unstructured data from customer service channels – the call center, helpdesk or online bots, and social media pages- is a rich source of intelligence that brands must strategically leverage to create a winning overall customer experience.

Main strategies to improve the service experience!

Ensuring an excellent customer service experience is not a one-time activity. It’s an ongoing effort. It is a way of life for companies with customer focus as their motto. Just as Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, says: “We’re not obsessed with competitors, we’re obsessed with customers.” This is how Amazon expanded its business in many countries by offering an excellent customer experience. Here are some strategies to improve your customer service efforts.

1. Know your customer

For customer service teams, having insights into their customers is basic hygiene. Microsoft’s 2017 State of Global Customer Service Report stated that 72% of consumers expect customer service agents to “know who they are, what they purchased, and have information about their past engagements.” It is possible when you outline your different customer personas to segment service solutions based on preferences. If possible, have the technology to offer personalized solutions based on each client’s history, according to their country and references.

For example, customer A is in the 30-35 age group, is tech-savvy (you can tell this from past activity on your app or website), and prefers to check out your ready-made video tutorials or interact with the chatbot. On the other hand, Customer B is 45 to 50 years old and mainly tries to speak to a customer service representative whenever he needs assistance.

If customer service executives have this information, they can proactively provide better support to each type of customer.

2. Empathy and building an emotional connection

Companies deal with people, and people have emotions. Many companies lose out on customer service when they don’t realize that customers are more than just data in their systems. It’s a real human experience with brands and their products/services. By showing empathy for your customers, you are ‘humanizing’ their customer service experience.

As Damon Richards, a customer service expert, mentioned in Forbes, “Customers don’t care what you know unless they know how much you care.”

Zappos is an example of how a company can truly create a connection with its customers. Its CEO, Tony Hsieh, responds to every email or message personally, and many stories show how the company is measuring up to its customers. In one such case, a customer came to Zappos explaining that he could not return shoes in time because his mother had passed away. When Zappos found out, they not only took care of the return shipping, but the next day, they sent a bouquet with a note of condolence from the Zappos customer service team.

In doing so, Zappos connects with its customers through honest emotions, has grown its business over the years, and has won hearts and loyal followers.

3. Automation balanced with human touch.

Certain, more process-oriented aspects of the customer experience can be automated, increasing the speed and efficiency of service. For example, a customer support chatbot can help your customers with basic FAQs, demonstrations, instructions on how to use a product, or resolving basic complaints.

However, there is a limit to how much automation can handle and how satisfied your customers are with automated responses. After a point, most people would rather connect with a real person to share their concerns than tell the machine about it.

A 2017 study by American Express, titled ‘2017 Customer Service Barometer’, says that 40% of customers prefer to talk to a real person over the phone for more complicated interactions like payment disputes. Supporting this fact, Microsoft reports that 30% of consumers worldwide agree that not being able to reach a real human being is the most frustrating part of a bad customer service experience.

This shows that while automation can improve customer service efficiency, it will never be able to completely replace what humans can offer to provide an excellent customer service experience. Businesses need to recognize this and strike a balance between the two to ensure a seamless customer service experience.

4. Empower your employees

The responsibility for ensuring a good customer service experience cannot rest solely in the hands of a few decision-makers. As Zappos’ Tony Hsieh says, “Customer service shouldn’t be a department. It should be the entire company. A good service experience at all levels is only possible when every employee can see how they can contribute to creating customer delight.

Companies must empower customer-facing employees by allowing them the authority and freedom to decide when to go the extra mile to satisfy customers.

The Ritz Carlton Hotel is a solid example of how capable employees can do a great job in customer service. Author John Di Julius describes his experience at The Ritz-Carlton Sarasota, where he accidentally left his laptop charger. Here’s what he says about what happened next. “I planned to call when I got back to my office, but I received a next-day air package from The Ritz-Carlton Sarasota before I could. In it was my charger, with a note saying: ‘Mr. Di Julius, I wanted to ensure we got to you immediately. I’m sure you need it, and just in case, I sent an extra charger for your laptop.” Larry K. Kinney signed the note at Loss Prevention.”

This was possible because all Ritz-Carlton group employees are authorized to spend up to $2,000 daily to improve the guest experience. More than the monetary allowance, as with Ritz-Carlton employees, it’s also about how well you involve them and how empowered they feel to make spontaneous decisions when they’re in a situation with a customer.

5. Seek employee feedback to improve customer service

Employee feedback is just as important to the customer service experience as customer feedback. While companies do a lot to measure the latter, through Net Promoter Score (NPS) and other surveys, many companies miss out on studying employee feedback.

Don’t wait for formal performance review conversations with customer service employees; instead, capture their experiences, thoughts, and ideas regularly to see if they are well engaged or supported by the organization to do their job well.

Many companies already invest in evaluating their executives’ telephone and email communications with customers and, if necessary, providing training for improvement. But talking to them one-on-one, tracking their day-to-day challenges, and being sensitive to their concerns will reveal more about your customer-employee relationship as an employer. To enable customer service executives to make their customers feel valued, you first need to help them feel good.

Efficiency would be the act of “doing things right”, while effectiveness consists of “doing the right things”.