The paradigm has changed with customer service. Because of rising competition, shifting your thinking about customer service is as easy as calling it, the customer experience. Once you begin to think in terms of enhancing the customer experience (CX), then you’ll see subtle, yet significant changes in your approach to retaining customers, which further leads towards winning over new ones.
You might have a fantastic product, but if your customer service is unreliable, unhelpful, or just plain hard to get in touch with, folks of your present customers will hear about it, and you will lose customers over it. That’s one of the big reasons why investing in customer service is key to long-term business success.
But what does it mean to provide great customer service, and how can you make sure that every customer has a great experience with your business when they reach out for help? Before we get into how, let’s first learn what exactly is a great customer experience?
What is great customer service or customer experience?
Great customer experience means following best practices like valuing the time of the customers, having a pleasant attitude, and providing knowledgeable and resourceful resources, but that you also take things a step further to exceed instead of only meeting expectations.
In Customer Experience Impact Report 2011 by Oracle, the company cites research that found that 86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience.
Ways to Deliver Best Possible Customer Experience
- Create a clear customer experience vision
The first step in your customer experience strategy is to have a clear customer-focused vision that can be communicated with your organization. The easiest way to define this vision is to develop a set of statements that act as guiding principles.
One of the examples is Zappos, they utilize their core family values and these values are embedded into their culture; which includes delivering wow through service, being humble, and embracing change.
Once these principles are in place, they will drive the behavior of your business. Each member of your team should know these principles by heart and they should be embedded into all areas of training and development.
- Solve-Problems in a Creative Manner
More than 80% of customers have churned because they experienced bad customer service. That’s the reason why you must thrive on solving problems for your customers and make it a central part of your support role and there will always be problems to solve.
Most of you might have heard about the legendary customer service at Zappos, we considered their example in the above point as well, they are just best when it comes to CX. They once sent a best man free shoes the night before the wedding after his order was sent to the wrong location due to a mistake by the delivery company. Zappos solved a problem and exemplified excellent customer service. They won a customer for life and gave the man a story that he couldn’t wait to share.
Don’t be afraid to surprise your customers as you seek to problem-solve for them. You could just fix the issue and be on your way, but by creatively meeting their requirements in ways that go above and beyond, you will create customers that are committed to you and your product.
- Build Offline Customer Relationships
Most online businesses use a number of SaaS products. Think about where your interactions with your SaaS providers take place: almost 100% via email, right? Maybe live chat every now and then, or even a phone call from time to time.
But how many SaaS companies “break the digital plane,” so to speak, and extend a warm personal touch to their customers outside of the internet world?
How can an online business break the glass barriers of the internet and build an offline connection, to explain this we would like to put before you a very simple but extremely unique and creative idea of Stride. Stride is a CRM tool, which got acquired by the founders of KISSmetrics and CrazyEgg. They send handwritten notes to their customers. You might be thinking of a handwritten note, seriously? Is it unique in any manner? So, just think once, you are an online business and have an almost negligible personal touch on whatever you do for your clients, from acquisition-communication to service.
This handwritten note from Stride adds a human touch, Stride elevates their customers’ experience beyond what they’d ever expected from a SaaS company.
Conclusion
Businesses with great customer experiences report having higher customer referral rates and customer satisfaction as well. This means higher customer loyalty and customer retention. These happy customers will speak highly about your brand and want to return, only because you made them feel good and made their experience enjoyable.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chandrima Samanta
Content-Editor at MartechCube
Chandrima is a Content management executive with a flair for creating high quality content irrespective of genre. She believes in crafting stories irrespective of genre and bringing them to a creative form. Prior to working for MartechCube she was a Business Analyst with Capgemini.