Effective customer service is essential for any business, as it helps to attract and retain customers, increase sales, and improve overall business performance. A huge 68% of customers claim they’re happy to spend more if the customer service is right! A great thing you can do to set your business apart is to provide top-notch service for your people, here’s a few tips & tricks on how to do it!
“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” –Jeff Bezos
First and foremost, effective customer service helps to attract and retain customers. 86% of people say that good customer service helps turn them from a 1-time ‘transactional customer’ to a ‘loyal relationship customer’. When customers have a positive experience with a business, they are more likely to return and recommend the business to others, but beware! On the other hand, if a customer has a negative experience, they are less likely to return and may even tell others to avoid the business. In today’s digital age, word-of-mouth can travel quickly and widely, so it’s crucial for businesses to provide a positive customer experience to maintain a good reputation and attract new customers.
Great customer service isn’t only good for your business & your customers, but your marketing team will love you to. It provides them with data that can inform them as to what’s working & what isn’t, so they’ll be able to change up their advertising campaigns to appeal to the right customer at the right time, all because they now know what works for the customer & what they actually want!
Great customer service goes beyond a face-to-face interaction. It starts as soon as someone see’s or hears of your brand (sometimes referred to the Zero Point of Contact). Whether you operate a B2B, a brick & mortar store, or an online shop, great customer service can be done in a few ways.
Instant Messaging
If you’re a millennial like me, the first thing you think of when someone mentions Instant Messaging is MSN, Facebook Messenger, BBM, or even WhatsApp! But the keyword here is Instant. 41% of customers prefer online support over phone or email. That’s a huge chunk of customers that you don’t want to alienate, and this number is only going to grow! Being able to communicate and find out what they want instantly is important. If your website gets a lot of traffic but not many leads, the lack of information you’re displaying may be the reason why. Software’s like 3CX can easily and quickly set you up with a bespoke Instant Messaging service that suits your business and gives your potential clients & customers the information they want. It goes beyond just messaging to, as you can easily set up a Video Call, send pictures back & forth to help fix issues, & even send over products or services for your customers to purchase whilst they’re instant messaging you!
The drawback here is the number of messages you may get during a normal day & making sure you have the staffing power to answer them all so you don’t lose any leads or sales! This is where you may want to look at AI powered responses to answer most of queries, & then your customers can have the option to connect to a human if they need to.
Phone Systems
A robust and easy to use phone system is vital for your internal & external customers. The quicker you can either answer your customers questions or get them speaking to a person is key! Nothing irks people more than hundreds of options they need to listen through to get to the service they need. The goal is to minimise the amount of time they need to spend listening to a robot giving them options, and there’s a few ways you can make this experience a bit better for them.
A great IVR experience is something that’s often overlooked. Depending on the image you want your business to portray to people, getting the right voice for your IVR is time well spent. For example, Scottish Power have fantastic IVR recordings of someone with a Scottish Accent that gives you clear options to press, and you usually get through to speak to a person quickly which makes the whole experience very palatable.
Next is the less options on your Phone System the better. I won’t lie though this is a balancing act! You may need a lot of options for the customer depending on what you offer, but as much as you can cut down the time a customer spends on your phone system or on hold the better.
Social Media
Did you know that 55% of customers learn about new brands & products from Social Media? That numbers growing, so the importance of an effective Social Media presence is only getting stronger. Even if your only goal is to improve your customer service, the regularly posting on Social Media lets customers know you’re still reachable on these platforms.
I would bet your business already has their Social Media channels set up, but how often do you post & interact with customers on them? Here are some useful statistics & data for how often you should be posting on Social Media.
Facebook – 1-2 Times Per Day
Studies have shown that posting any more than twice per day can lose you followers on Facebook! People hate their timelines being clogged up with the same messages.
Instagram – 3-7 Times per Week
Brayden Cohen (Instagram’s Social Media Marketing Lead) says you can double your followers by just regularly posting a few times a week.
Twitter – 1-5 Tweets per Day
Watch Time on Twitter has increased by 72%, so people are looking at more & more posts. Regularly posting every day keeps your brand in the algorithm, and noticeable to people. They may not engage with every tweet, but reminding people you’re there is really valuable to your brand.
LinkedIn – 1-5 Times per Week.
Compared to brands that keep a low profile, you can x6 more new followers every month if you post regularly.
You can easily keep on-top of your Social Media needs for your business with a few pieces of software. Canva is a great service that allows anybody to make professional looking content at the drop of a hat. You can then kick things up a notch by buying a scheduling software for your accounts like Hootsuit or SocialPilot. Both of these software’s allow you read & reply to messages as well, so you can still keep all of your communications in one place. With a Software like 3CX you can even bring these social media communications (Facebook & WhatsApp) into your overall Unified Comms System, and truly have everything in one place!
We are MID Digital Solutions, and if you’ve found this blog useful and would like to learn more about some of the solutions I’ve talked about (3CX, CallSwitch etc.) then please don’t hesitate to get in touch.