The way your brand engages with customers greatly determines the success of your business. A loyal customer brings not only recurring busines, but a referral through word of mouth has the most impact on a prospect’s psyche. In other words, loyal customers are worth their weight in gold.
Nowadays, most customers are more interested in the experience than the product or service a business offers. Make that experience great and you’ll have a valuable patron for life.
Your customer service team members play a crucial role in your business interactions, which is why it's necessary to ensure that they're at the top of their game. In this blog, I present certain practices that you can implement to do just that.
1. One voice
Relaying mixed messaging is one of the more common mistakes customer service teams make. When customers reach out and get varying responses from different representatives, it leaves a bad impression toward your brand. You really don’t want a client complaint due to this.
Having written that, I don’t mean that you should turn your reps into robots who say everything from a list of responses. Customers can sense whether they’re having a genuine conversation or a staged one. That might lead to a different set of problems.
It’s all about establishing a definite set of values for your business and instilling them within your staff. This ensures a solid baseline for all the customer’s interactions with your brand.
As long your team members understand what your business stands for, they’ll interact with a unified voice regardless of how their communication starts with the customer.
2. Continuous team training
As your business develops, there would certainly be an increase in your products and services. You need to make sure that your staff is up to date regarding the information pertaining to your business.
To ensure that your team has a deep understanding of your overall offerings, conducting regular team training is a mandate. One-time deal onboarding training isn't going to cut it anymore, considering the dynamic product development and market.
You can also consider conducting regular product or domain knowledge tests for your reps. On top of that, holding team meetings to discuss the latest product changes is also a good idea. Even if your business doesn’t have any recent developments, continue to hone your team’s expertise with your core product offerings and organizational values.
3. Implement CRM platforms
A lot of businesses face challenges while coordinating different teams. Let’s take the sales and marketing teams, for example. The sales team complains that it doesn't receive qualified leads from marketing, while the marketing team says that sales doesn’t act on leads on time.
A customer relationship management system (or CRM) like Keap can effectively deal with these issues. The CRM can provide a unified dashboard that can capture all the data from different teams in real time. This way all the teams are aware of the current position and avoid confusion.
This is just one of many benefits a CRM provides. Here are other benefits that Keap's CRM can bring to your business:
Reduces the load off the customer service team by sending automated personalized emails or messages to the customers.
Tracks customer interactions and updates their profiles in the database. This makes it easier for the teams to determine how far the customer is in the buyer’s journey.
Automatically tracks all the actions taken by users and communicates with them in a personalized and contextual manner. This is great for developing customer relationships.
Easily integrates with multiple platforms such as social media and business websites. This enables your team to reach the leads or customers wherever they are.
4. Importance of customer feedback
To achieve customer satisfaction your teams need to understand their needs, experiences, and challenges. Customer feedback is a great way to do this.
Your business needs to make sure that there are multiple channels through which your customer service teams can ask for feedback. Whether it's via email, message or telephonic survey, gathering feedback is a must.
You can even set up a complaint system in which customers can register their issues. The feedbacks are very useful in optimizing your team’s performance. It provides crucial insights about what your team is doing well and identifies the scope for further improvement.
Another benefit of asking for feedback is that it lets the customers know that your brand cares about them and strives to make their experience better.
5. Inculcate time management
While your customer service team has to make every customer feel special, it also has to tend to a lot of them. Given the limited amount of time the team has, it's necessary for it to efficiently manage its time while dealing with customers.
One thing your reps can do while engaging with customers: if they're not aware of a solution to a customer query, then they should immediately forward the query to someone who is. There's no reason for them to waste their time as well as the customer’s time.
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— Keap (@KeapGrowing) May 16, 2020
6. Reach out through multichannel approach
People love it when they're able to reach out to businesses wherever they are, and as conveniently as possible. Which is why it's a good idea to make omnichannel communication options available to customers.
Your business should be reachable through multiple channels while maintaining a consistent quality of service as well as branding. This will boost your reputation and elevate the customer’s experience.
Here are some of the channels that your brand must be reachable on:
Cell phone: Most people prefer to reach businesses while on the move and they expect good support services while doing that. You must ensure that your customer service is mobile optimized to meet customer expectations.
Social media: More and more consumers are using social channels for their queries and complaints. You should utilize the power of social media to reach out to customers in a casual manner.
7. Encourage team excellence
Now, this practice might differ from business to business, however by incentivizing employees based on their customer service skill would encourage them to perform even better.
There's always a scope of improvement in customer service, and when you recognize individuals for their efforts they try to further improve their performance.
Conclusion
Customer loyalty is a priceless commodity in today’s cutthroat market. That's why you should always strive toward building upon your customer service standards and keeping your customers happy.
Most of the above-mentioned practices can be implemented with the help of good CRM like Keap. All it takes is a bit of effort in its initial setup and you’ll have an automated workhorse to boost your customer relationships.
If you need help in setting up your CRM, or if you have any questions about it, please contact us. We’d be happy to help you.
About the author
Raj Gautam is CEO & Founder of QL Tech, Located in Perth, Australia. QL Tech is one of the best companies that offer unique Digital Marketing & Web Development Services by the virtue of its dedicated professionals. Our professionals are extremely proficient in offering Social Media Marketing. You can connect with us on LinkedIn.
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