In a world where customer expectations evolve as quickly as technology, businesses must ensure their customer support teams are prepared to adapt to these changes. Failure to adapt can lead to customers turning to competitors who are more attuned to their needs.
Implementing advanced support systems, whether it’s through sophisticated ticketing to streamline agent interactions or self-service options for customer autonomy, is crucial for elevating customer support performance.
To stay competitive and meet the increasing demands of consumers, companies must adopt innovative strategies that enhance their customer support capabilities. Here are key methods to achieve this:
Table of Contents
1. Foster a Culture of Customer Centricity
Creating a culture of customer-centricity means embedding the value of customer support not just within the customer service department but across the entire organization. This approach recognizes that every interaction a customer has with your brand, from browsing your website to communicating with your sales team, impacts their overall experience. To foster this culture:
- Training and Awareness: Conduct regular training sessions for all employees, not just customer support agents, on the importance of customer centricity. This involves getting a deep understanding of what customers need, putting ourselves in their shoes to grasp their situations truly, and providing answers that not only solve their issues but also make them feel valued and loyal to our brand.
- Cross-Departmental Collaboration: Encourage different departments to collaborate on projects or initiatives aimed at improving the customer experience. For example, product development teams can work closely with customer support to address common issues highlighted by customers.
- Leadership Example: Leadership should set the example by prioritizing customer feedback in strategic decisions. When leaders demonstrate a commitment to customer satisfaction, it sends a powerful message throughout the organization.
2. Ensure Message Consistency
Consistent messaging across all company touchpoints builds trust and clarity with customers. It ensures that no matter how or where a customer interacts with your brand, they receive the same information and feel a sense of reliability and stability in your services. Achieving this requires:
- Unified Brand Voice: Develop a brand voice guide that outlines how your brand communicates, including tone, language, and messaging. This guide should be accessible to everyone in the company to ensure uniform communication across all channels.
- Content Collaboration Platforms: Use content management systems (CMS) and collaboration platforms where updates, documents, and messaging guidelines can be shared and accessed by everyone. This ensures that any changes to product information, policies, or procedures are immediately disseminated company-wide.
- Feedback Loops: Implement feedback loops between customer-facing teams and internal teams. This ensures that customer feedback and queries lead to updates in FAQs, product documentation, and other customer-facing materials, keeping messaging current and consistent.
3. Iconize your customer support as an organization-wide value
Good customer service isn’t only about answering a customer’s queries on call, but certainly, there is much more to that. Besides the customer support personnel, even employees from different departments should recognize and acknowledge the significance of customer-oriented or ‘people’ skills.
The attitude and tone used over the phone or live chat with your customers should also be employed by the advertising team in devising marketing strategies and messages, general email correspondence, and the behavior portrayed to your targeted audience over any medium.
It’s about building an environment that reciprocates with customers’ wants in their interaction and engagement with the brand and the company. This facilitates the creation of an atmosphere where a great customer service team can work and flourish together, with the aim of providing unmatched support services to customers in an empathetic and open-minded way.
4. Spread consistent messaging throughout the company
Whether you run a startup or an established enterprise, knowledge-sharing activities with the purpose of keeping everyone onboard well-informed is not as easy as it sounds. Sometimes, even experienced organizations struggle in this regard. Small and large companies have their own reasons for experiencing intra-company communication hurdles due to a number of factors, including size, bureaucracy, etc.
To address these issues, you need to draft the important documentation that needs to be distributed. Companies that trust their internal knowledge and promote self-service solutions find it much easier to adapt and distribute content. This will also provide your customer support employees the opportunity to acquire spot training. Rather than giving your customers a chance to complain about receiving contradicting messages from different agents, the brand message should be uniform and clear for all the agents in the customer support team.
5. Eliminate anonymity from the team
Even though there are times and jobs where fake profiles and personas are used in an organization, a great customer support team realizes the importance of having a real personal connection. The better the online chat agents communicate on a much deeper and more emotional level, the safer and more comfortable the customers will feel taking their concerns and queries.
The same approach must be undertaken by personnel who act as the face of the company, namely, digital marketers, salespeople, operations managers, etc. Such professionals can display the company’s best image and build customer trust through social media platforms. Great communication always originates when there is healthy person-to-person (P2P) communication. Talk to your customers as humanely and professionally as possible in order to acquire customer trust and loyalty.
6. Availability and accessibility at all times
Yes, the customer support team must be available to their customers. If not in the literal sense, but you do not want your customers impatiently waiting for their issues to be answered, not to mention them deciding to quit your business and seek a much better people-centric alternative. It is obvious that any customer, regardless of the industry, would like to be heard and acknowledged in a quick and prompt manner. Consider the following statistics:
- Around 33% of customers would second a brand to others that offer a swift but ineffectual response.
- On the other hand, about 17% of customers would prefer a product/service that provides a slow benefit but proves to be a powerful problem-solver.
- 53% of customers on Twitter who have a question regarding a product expect a reliable response within an hour, while in the case of registering a complaint, the number jumps to 72%.
Speed isn’t the only significant factor for customers. Still, the heavy traffic on social media, search engines, online product review articles, and forums has enabled customers to acquire the exact information needed to make patient and educated purchases. So it is evidently vital for businesses to include feedback or two-way communication options from all digital mediums and devices if they are to provide exceptional customer service.
7. An accessible knowledge
It’s simple: never make your customers puff and sweat in order to get the information they want. Even though FAQs are important, standard, and a top-notch weapon in the customer support team’s arsenal, that, too, is still never enough. Let’s not forget today, the global customer base is impatient enough and expects their concerns to be answered without needing to write an email to the agent, open a live chat pop-up window, or make a call to the company’s customer support department.
Consider the example of a customer who is in the middle of purchasing a product but instantly feels the need to acquire additional details to think his/her decision to purchase is genuinely worthwhile. According to a study conducted by Forrester, about 45% of customers will quit their online purchasing if they are unable to find a satisfactory answer to their burning questions. To serve the purpose appropriately, an FAQ solutions page must be creative and diverse rather than restricted to a single page of the website.
