customer service

3 Strategies to Improve Your Customer Service Standard

customer service

credit: ngDesk.com

Customer service is as important as anything that has to do with your business/organization. Here are the best 3 strategies to help improve your customer service standards:

1. Seek Customer Feedback

To provide excellent customer service, you first need to understand their needs and experiences. For these, you need to ensure that you provide your customers’ multiple ways to share their feedback. You can do this through surveys, feedback forms sent via email or even establish a complaint system.

This will let you know all about their good, bad, and ugly experiences when interacting with your brand. Through this, you gain real insights into what you’re doing well, and which areas require improvement. This can help to establish trust, and may even prevent them from sharing their concerns or negative comments on social media.

2. Strengthen Your Customer Service Team

Improving your customer service begins with building a strong customer service team. Here’s how you can strengthen your service performance.

  • Hire and Train Professionals with the Right Skills: No tool or AI element will compensate for the lack of a skilled workforce. When you hire people for your customer service team, you should look for individuals with the right skills.
  • Organize training sessions for them to improve their skills once they’re on board: Some notable skills every customer service representative needs to have are: Empathy and Patience, Good Communication skills, Knowledge of products and services.

 

3. Leverage Multi-Channel Servicing

Customers should be able to switch between multiple channels yet enjoy a consistent quality of service. This can help boost your brand’s reputation and credibility.

Here are some excellent multi-channel services for your customers.

  • Mobile Devices –You need to ensure that your customer service and support pages are mobile-ready to meet their expectations.

 

  • Social Media – Many consumers are turning to social networks for customer queries and complaints. You should utilize the power of social media to bridge the gap between you and your consumers.

 

  • Self-Service –Many customers expect brands to help them fix minor issues by themselves, and they’ll often look for such solutions on your website’s FAQ pages.

You should consistently focus on improving your customer service standards. Great customer service can help you build trust, improve brand awareness, gain customer loyalty, drive sales, and attract new customers through valuable recommendations.

retargeting

Consumer Bias: The Mere Exposure Effect

In a 1968 study, Oregon State University Professor Charles Goetzinger ran an experiment in his classroom. Without informing the rest of his class, he had one student come to each meeting in a black bag with only his feet visible. Goetzinger then observed the reaction of other students. Initially, his students treated the “black bag” with hostility. Over time, however, as they kept seeing the black bag in class every day, their hostility turned into curiosity. Eventually, classmates developed friendships with the student in the black bag.

Goetzinger’s experiment only proved the efficacy of a theory that has been posited long before: familiarity breeds content. You can use that.

 

How to Use the Mere Exposure Effect to Boost Your Sales

  1. Leverage retargeting to boost sales.

When trying to advertise your products or services, retargeting people who have visited your website before will yield significantly better results than targeting raw prospects. In fact, a particular study found that the click-through rate of a retargeted ad is 10 times higher than that of a display ad and that website visitors who are retargeted with display ads are 70% more likely to convert.

  1. Repurpose and distribute existing content.

You can also boost sales by significantly expanding the reach of your content by repurposing and distributing it. A simple blog post can be turned into an infographic, video, podcast, slide presentation, and so much more. When distributed across other channels, some people are likely to see it more than once – and that’s good for your sales!

  1. Reshare existing content on social media.

You can also leverage the mere exposure effect by resharing your existing content on social media. Buzzsumo researched this effect by analysing 100 million articles and found that constantly resharing articles on social media can increase reach and engagement by 686%.

Credit: WordStream

The IKEA Effect

Consumer Bias: The IKEA Effect

In a 2011 study, researchers observed consumers as they assembled IKEA boxes, folded origami, and built Lego pieces. They found that participants saw their “amateurish creations” as similar in value to the creations of experts. More interestingly, the participants expected others to share this view of their work.

Based on these results, the researchers concluded that people tend to value a product more if they were involved in its creation – even if they were originally uninterested in being involved. They termed this the “IKEA effect.”

The IKEA effect has a clear application in your marketing strategy: when you involve users in the process of creating your product or services, they are more likely to convert when you sell it to them.

 

How to Use the IKEA Effect to Boost Your Sales

  1. Involve consumers in the process of building your products.

Consumers can be involved by committing time to product development, by giving input in the process of its creation or improvement, or by investing money. An example of this in action is crowdfunding campaigns: when people contribute financially to the development of a product even before it is made, they are more likely to do everything to ensure it succeeds. While crowdfunded projects were massively successful, researchers have attributed its success not to the funds raised but to the community and sense of ownership the crowdfunding fostered.

 

  1. Give users the option of having your products customized for them.

Whether it’s the packaging or certain parts of the product itself, offering a customizable option involves your customers and potential customers more personally. A notable example of this is Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke campaign. When Coca-Cola launched this initiative and allowed users to have their own customized version of the Coke, sales exploded. And the results were almost instant. Just within the first year, Coca-Cola saw significant, measurable success:

  • The Share a Coke campaign was one of the most successful marketing campaigns ever in Coca-Cola’s history.
  • Over 500,000 photos were posted online using the #ShareaCoke hashtag.
  • Coca-Cola users created over six million virtual Coke bottles.
  • Coca-Cola gained 25 million Facebook followers.

Credit: WordStream

internal communication

The impact of internal communication on customer experience

What is internal communication? – Dora in the Communications World

Communications with individuals and groups outside of your organization can directly impact brand loyalty, visibility, reputation, and revenue. Effectively managed internal communications creates a ripple effect that can positively influence external relationships with customers, third-party vendors, business partners, and even competitors.

Effective internal communication enhances customer relationships

While there is significant value in prioritizing employee satisfaction alone, it also tends to organically translate into more effective interactions with customers. It’s not hard to understand why: Happy people naturally exhibit more positive attitudes, and others are more likely to respond in kind.

Employees’ opinions about their company can also influence customer relationships. There is a growing public interest in how well companies treat their employees, and customers often look to employees’ opinions to inform their own buying decisions.

Consistent internal communication improves partner and vendor relationships

As effective communication practices become a regular part of your everyday internal operations, they will naturally begin to extend to external communications with groups such as third-party vendors.

Consistency, in particular, is key to nurturing these relationships. Consistent, on-brand communication naturally fosters a sense of leadership and authority that will encourage other companies and third-party vendors to trust in and collaborate with your organization.

Communication is a means of protecting your company’s voice. If you do so in a way that evokes respect and admiration, this will increase the perceived value of a partnership with your brand—which in turn will increase your brand reach.

 

How to improve team communication

No matter the company, there is always room for improvement in internal communication. Here are a few steps you can take to start improving this for your team and company today:

  • Define your expectations clearly regarding tone, language, and the use of various channels. A brand style guide can be especially helpful in sharing these expectations and maintaining consistency across all communications.
  • Make it easy for team members to connect. Offer multiple channels and allow employees flexibility, whenever possible, to use the channels that best suit their communication style and preferences.
  • Clarify each person’s role within the team. Teams work most efficiently and effectively when members know which individuals are best equipped to answer general questions or troubleshoot certain types of problems.
  • Lead by example. Make sure management models good communication practices by being transparent, honest, direct, and respectful of others’ time. Avoid spamming workers with unnecessary messages and always include a call to action that clearly defines what response you expect to see.
  • Have open discussions with your team about current communication practices, how they can be improved, and what benefits they can expect to see from doing so. Be willing to listen to feedback and ideas, and be ready to offer solutions to common or recurring challenges.

Credit: Grammarly