In business, it’s only natural that you concentrate on serving your customers with as much grace and respect as possible in order to make them feel happy and contented that they chose to trade with you. With good customer service comes good customer retention, and a positive word-of-mouth style of marketing that rewards the best-practice organizations. However, in your overall customer service planning, you may have missed some key elements that can help you better understand your customers and plan for different demographics. In this guide, we’ll focus on the three most overlooked mistakes companies make in customer service – and how you can turn that around.
Neglecting the Entire Journey
Customer services are a little bit like medicine: you treat wounds and illnesses, but you rarely address the root cause. And, of course, patients and customers would rather avoid these unpleasant scenarios altogether, instead of getting ill or experiencing an issue with your product or service.
If you’re serious about boosting your customer satisfaction scores, you need to start looking at the entire journey that your customers undertake – from first discovering your brand, all the way through to the point at which they receive the product or service they ordered. With this holistic view of your customer services provisions, you’ll understand at which points the customer might become disappointed, and start directing your energies and expertise to these touch points that matter the most.
Feedback is Crucial
You might find that following all of the rules of customer service is enough to please your customers – but how can you truly know that they’re leaving with smiles on their faces and satisfaction in their souls if you’ve not asked them? Of course, some individuals find customer feedback methods a little invasive and irrelevant, so you need to be careful about how you decide to introduce these feedback mechanisms into your business.
Possibly the easiest way to conduct in-person feedback is to use a retail customer survey that’s left at the exit of your store, or just after the check-outs. This is where customers typically ‘end’ their journeys with you, and a small machine placed here asking customers to rate their time with you can really help you understand the variables of their experience.
Adding Value
One of the major schools of marketing theory in the twenty-first century has been around behavioral economics. This theory suggests that it’s not what you experience from a product or service that tells you its worth – it’s how you are made to feel about your purchase.
In this way, you could sell a gold watch with terrible and careless customer service that can make it feel like plastic; but a simple digital watch wrapped professionally and delivered with a note of thanks can feel like a Rolex! It’s these customer service touches that can add a significant amount of value to your customer’s experience, and will encourage them to shop with you again – for the feeling, not the facts.
These three areas of expertise will help you deliver cutting-edge and exciting customer service into 2020 and beyond.
