Picture this: your customer encounters an issue with your product or service and, with some hesitance, reaches out to your support team. While they expect a typical “your request is important to us” response, they are pleasantly surprised when they receive an immediate reply crafted precisely for them with targeted follow-up messages.
The result? A satisfied customer, and more importantly, a loyal one.
Organizations may deliver state-of-the-art products and services and have customers worldwide, but customer relationships are not built on your products alone. One of the most critical aspects of building trust and creating long-lasting relationships is a disarmingly simple one: excellent customer service.
Customer service is the face of your company and the right strategies enhance customer experiences, improve satisfaction, and help maintain strong relationships.
Key pointers
- Customer services refers to providing support to customers for issues related to your company’s product or service. Customer service usually involves answering questions and solving customer requests via email, telephone, social media, or chat. It could also include creating self-support resources.
- About 96% of customers say that when choosing to stay loyal to a brand, customer service is one of the key aspects they consider. Some of the best customer service practices involve addressing customer queries with adaptability, patience, and empathy. The goal is always to improve customer experiences.
- Customer service is a vital factor in determining a business’s success. Research shows that 78% of customers are likely to forgive errors if the business provides excellent customer service. Positive customer service interactions, therefore, are more likely to help companies expand.
How to improve customer service: 7 key strategies
Improving customer service means offering better support by responding quickly, solving problems effectively, and personalizing experiences. By using technology and gathering feedback, businesses can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
1. Understand customer requirements
Understanding your customers’ needs is like having a compass to guide your business goals and growth journey. Businesses that collect customer information, feedback, and needs have a deeper understanding of their behavior and preferences. This, in turn, helps companies with product development, giving them an edge over their competition
Customer feedback management is also essential. The information gathered from these feedback forms and surveys needs to be efficiently utilized to collect, analyze, and act on user experiences. This can help improve the processes, products, and services provided by your company.
2. Establish clear customer service standards
Another important step to setting up a good basis for customer service is ensuring that team members have clear standards they can understand and implement. Take the time to develop certain guidelines that support teams can rely on when needed. These could include a variety of aspects, including the language and tone that represents your company’s values, the main point of contact, available resources, timescales, and more.
Customer satisfaction scores, or CSAT, play a huge role here in determining how satisfied users are with your products and services. How can your CSAT improve? Knowledge bases are some of the most preferred self-service avenues for customers. Additionally, AI agents (like DevRev’s AgentOS) can seamlessly execute tasks, address complex customer issues, offer personalized support, and increase customer loyalty and satisfaction.
3. Ensuring support teams are prepared
Support team members are the backbone of any company’s customer support services. Before improving customer satisfaction, it is essential to ensure that support teams are well-equipped to handle any issues that may come their way. This encompasses a wide range of factors- timelines, staffing numbers, clarity and transparency in roles, and more.
For example, if employees express that they require more time to handle issues or require more staff to handle their workload without being overwhelmed, it is important to ensure the right resources are provided to combat these problems.
Additionally, it is essential to ensure that all staff receive adequate training. Support teams need to have the knowledge and expertise to guide customers with their issues, and investing in proper customer service training will ensure this. Consider utilizing training modules from different online resources to upskill team members.
Technology also plays a central role, providing important customer support tools to team members. Artificial intelligence, for example, can be leveraged to automate routine and repetitive tasks to free up time and resources for agents. AI can also be used for chatbots to answer frequently asked questions, create knowledge databases, and more.
4. Problem-solving skills
Once staff has been provided with the proper training and tools, and everyone is on the same page regarding customer service standards, the focus shifts to the skills agents need to focus on. Problem-solving is the most important of these. Often, customers are unable to recognize and diagnose issues on their own, and customer support representatives must be able to troubleshoot their problems correctly.
This includes understanding the customer’s problem, what may have caused it, and what the customer was aiming to accomplish to begin with. For example, customers may have trouble logging in to their accounts.
It is up to the customer service agent to determine the root cause and guide clients through remedial steps. For example, say a client’s product isn’t working as expected. AI features, like PLuG, allow customers to ask general questions (for example, “Why isn’t my product working?”) for quick, accurate, and streamlined remedial steps. Self-service knowledge bases also mean users can access the right information whenever they need it and can escalate the issue to a live agent if needed.
5. Determine what employees need
Customer service can be challenging and frustrating. Dealing with multiple tickets of varying degrees of urgency and often encountering repetitive issues can be draining. Other problems, like slow and outdated technology, slow systems, low staffing, and more, may add to these challenges.
Without the proper support, customer support agents can be left feeling overwhelmed and burned out. In some cases, they may even seek employment elsewhere. To prevent high customer churn rates, companies need to prioritize the well-being of their employees. This could be in the form of employee surveys, feedback forms, mentoring programs, and more. Utilizing employee feedback, companies can identify and fill any gaps in staffing, training, technology, and more.
6. Encourage emotional intelligence
Customer support deals with people; one of the best ways to deal with people is to empathize with and relate to them. People like to feel understood; good customer service focuses on providing a personalized and positive user experience.
Companies that emphasize emotional intelligence can provide better customer service. Agents need to relate to and understand frustrated customers, intuitively understand their problems, and not take things personally. They also need to comprehend and resolve issues swiftly and efficiently. By showing empathy and understanding, customer service agents can de-escalate the situation, appease the customer, and provide an overall better experience.
7. Focus on easy and effortless customer service
If customers can easily access your offerings and support services, they are more likely to complete the sales process and return to your organization for future purchases. Companies can utilize information regarding a customer’s journey (such as where they find out about your company’s offerings, sales, and after-sales support). An easy way to ensure that customers have a positive experience is by creating streamlined support services at every stage of the journey.
Some points to consider include how easily they can find your company, how well they can understand your services and offerings, how easily they can contact support services, how accessible the organization is 24/7, any challenges in receiving a response from your company, and so on.
Companies can make a customer’s journey easier by explaining how their offerings work and how they will be delivered to the customer. To prevent confusion, organizations can also pre-empt possible queries at each stage of the buyer journey and explain them, resolve any possible problems in products and services, and ensure that round-the-clock support services are always easily accessible. This means customers can reach your support teams through multiple channels—phone, email, web portal, social media, or more.
Simply put, easy and uncomplicated customer service is more likely to retain customers and ensure positive user experiences.
Wrapping up
Prioritizing customer service helps companies establish trust, create positive relationships with customers, and build customer loyalty. It also improves brand equity, allowing your organization to provide your offerings at premium rates since customers trust you will meet and exceed their expectations.
Utilizing the right technology can help your organization meet growing customer demands. DevRev is an AI-native, cloud-based customer service and ticketing platform that helps organizations provide world-class customer support services. Its intuitive user interface comes with advanced AI and machine learning technology, providing users with efficient solutions for their issues.
DevRev’s AgentOS also provides customers with intelligent and personalized responses providing customers with accurate issue resolution. Our chatbot, PLuG, is aware of intent and sentiment, which reduces issue resolution times and provides clients with quick and efficient replies.
DevRev also brings various teams—customer service, engineering, and product development—together on a single platform to speed up resolutions and enhance communication between departments. To learn how our AI-native platform can improve your customer support workflows, try DevRev today!
