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Customer service—the phrase that usually sends a shiver down most business owners’ spines. In this day and age, it seems as if the customers have become more vocal and more at ease expressing themselves to brands globally. But, this shouldn’t actually be a bad thing. Although the customer may not always be right, the voice of the customer is critical to your brand and its success.
The fact of the matter is, it’s how you deal with and manage your customer that counts. How are you engaging with them? How are you using their feedback? Customer support is a key factor in the customer journey, and it is up to you to streamline it. So, we took a look at how you can do this. We unpacked some of the most successful strategies to improve customer support in your company.
Integrate Real-Time, Instant Solutions to Your Site
The first place to start is by knowing that every customer is different and has different needs when they want to communicate with you. While some still prefer to speak directly to a person, others prefer online communication.
Chatbots are highly popular and highly effective in managing customer support and engagement. They are simple to integrate, are highly effective, and can even be set up to send automated messages for specific conversations. So, many of the questions coming in from your customers can be automatically dealt with to a certain point.
Customers may, however, require a more personalized solution to their problems, in which case you can use a ticketing system. So, if you are using WordPress, for example, you will simply need to integrate a WordPress support ticketing system. This will allow you to quickly manage individual customer support issues, collaborate with other support agents on your team, solve problems faster and more efficiently, and monitor all of your support cases from a single interface.
Enhance Every Touchpoint in your Company
What you need to remember is that the customer journey in your organization is a multifaceted combination of elements. It is highly complex and differs from customer to customer. The customer journey needs to be carefully enhanced to ensure that every single touchpoint is carefully optimized for a great experience, no matter where they are.
Consider this: your customer could enter your website from various touchpoints. They could organically come across your brand or enter from your social media platforms. You could also have physical interactions with your customer. This means that every single touchpoint, where they will be interacting with you, needs to focus heavily on customer service.
Providing excellent customer service should be a constant priority for every single employee in your organization. This should be a company-wide effort involving everyone, from website developers to customer-facing employees. Customer service is not siloed in companies, and it is up to you to ensure that messaging and branding are carried through seamlessly at every single touchpoint.
Use Feedback Portals
Customer feedback is a key feature in your customer engagement strategy. It is the information, insights, issues, and input shared by your community about their interaction with your company. This feedback is vital to help guide your company’s continuous improvement.
Whether you need to improve the customer experience, your products, services, or touchpoints, positive and negative feedback is highly useful. With the right amount of feedback, you can get insight into what needs to be adapted to improve the customer experience over time.
There are a number of great ways to get feedback and input from your customer. Some of the most successful are:
- Customer feedback surveys;
- Email and customer contact forms;
- Usability tests;
- Exploratory customer interviews;
- Social media.
Measure, Monitor, and Test Everything
Data is your friend. The more data and information you collect over time, and the more sources you gather data from, the more you will know what is working and what’s not. Take a look at your site for example. If you do not know how much traffic is coming onto your site at a given time, or how it is behaving, how will you know how successful you are?
Asking your customer for direct feedback is one thing. But actually gathering data about their actual behavior and interests is something totally different. Google Analytics is a great, free tool to monitor the success and engagement of your site. It gives you unbiased feedback about what your customers are actually doing on your site.
Combine this data with data from your social platforms, your email platform, and solutions like HotJar, and you will be able to gain a deep insight into your customer. With this, you will be able to optimize what needs to be or contact the customer directly to find out what needs to be altered in order for them to convert.
Bottom Line
Be as open and transparent as you can. Keep various lines of communication open for your customers at all times. Know that some customers will respond differently to different communication styles. But, keep your brand and messaging top of mind at all times.
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