Image source: Pixabay
Customer service expectations are on the rise, faster than we’ve ever experienced before. Despite this, business owners have been extremely slow to react. If you go on much longer without taking steps to meet these expectations, your professional reputation is going to suffer a seriously damaging blow. The ongoing progress of tech has been the main culprit responsible for these rising standards, and this is where you need to be focussing your energies if you want your business to really thrive. Here are just a few things you should have been giving your customers yesterday!
First of all, more personalization. It’s pretty ironic that in such a far-reaching and universal online world, customers have been putting more and more emphasis on their individual needs. They want your business, and every other one, to put the info and products they want where they want them, and to give them personalized support when things go wrong. The modern, online customer is very impatient. If they have a question or run into a technical issue, and they can’t get the right support immediately, it’s pretty likely that they’ll abandon their cart and go to some other site. With this in mind, you need to make sure that a customer service agent is on-call on a live chat platform to answer any kind of customer queries. The next best thing is having a free phone number your customers can call in the borders of every single page. Ensure that your reps have access to the customer’s history and details so they know how to personalize their service.
Image source: Flickr
Closely related to personalisation, your customers are going to expect to have constant contact with you, whenever they want it. Making sure that they have this can often work to deflect incoming queries, shave down your labor costs, boost customer satisfaction and strengthen your overall professional reputation. The key to hitting this on the head is making sure the information they need comes at the right time, and through a channel which is best suited to your business model. If you’re providing an online application, then look into a live chat that includes a co-browsing feature. If you’re running a private medical institution, then read a guide to telemedicine. Before you increase your outbound communication, or start it in the first place, you need to consider your ideal customer and build it all around him or her. Do a little market research, and find out what your customers want to hear from you, when they want to hear it from you, and what their favorite channels for this kind of communication are. As an example, customers of a utility company will want any urgent updates texted to their phones, whereas B2B buyers usually prefer an email every now and then with all the scheduled procedures and contract changes. Tech and retail customers, on the other hand, will generally prefer to receive their correspondence through social media channels. The niche you occupy and the kinds of customers you serve will have a big impact on how you should keep them posted, so make sure you’re bearing this in mind.
Customers all over the world also want the businesses they buy from to listen in more detail, and respond faster to their comments. Though it varies from person to person, most of your customers aren’t going to be too annoyed by your requests for feedback and suggestions, provided you’re not constantly bombarding them with it. However, what a lot of them will get annoyed by is taking the time to give detailed feedback, and knowing that it’s been completely ignored. On your part, you need to know how to receive feedback, act on it, and then let your customers know that you’ve done it. Fail to do this, and your customers will quickly stop giving feedback altogether, and move onto another business that cares for their customers more. It’s important to make sure you’re receiving feedback in the right way, too. Random email surveys are generally treated as spam and ignored. Short questionnaires right after a purchase, on the other hand, garner a much better response. Furthermore, if you can get your customer service agents involved in the feedback experience, it will certainly be appreciated. You’ll be able to respond immediately to any below-average feedback, and have someone look into it straight away. Hopefully you won’t get too much negative feedback for this to become unmanageable!
As technology and the culture of modern businesses change, these standards are going to change with it. Make sure you’re keeping close tabs on your customer expectations, and changing things accordingly!
