3 Best Practices for Delivering Excellent Customer Service

Customer service is critical for your business’s success. In fact, American consumers will spend 17% more to do business with a company they feel gives exceptional customer service.

Additionally, incredible service can lead to more customers while a poor experience can have a huge negative impact on your business. On average, customers who are happy with their customer service will tell nine people about their experience, generating free word-of-mouth marketing. But, if an individual has a bad experience, he or she can reach up to 26 customers and even more if they engage with social media.

3 Ways to Increase Your Customers’ Satisfaction

Before you can reap the tangible benefits of satisfied customers, you need to understand which practices are crucial when developing superior customer service.

Let’s take a look at the critical elements that can combine to create an outstanding customer service experience for your clients.

1. Give Customers a Fast Response Time

Today’s digital environment has customers conditioned for speed, and customer service is no different.

Interactive Intelligence Group’s Customer Experience Survey showed that a fast response was ranked higher by customers than knowledgeable agents, professionalism, and efficiency.

And yet, Harvard Business Review notes that in most businesses, customer service is slow—even during the sales process.

In fact, a mere 37% of companies got back to leads within an hour and a shocking 23% never responded at all. Most companies managed to respond within 42 hours, but it is clear that customers expect faster response rates.

When customers were asked how long they were willing to wait for service, it only slightly varied by social media platform. Customers expected the following times:

If they reach out on Twitter — one hour

If they reach out on Facebook — six hours

If they reach out through email — six hours

The moral of the story? If you snooze, you lose. Great customer service is built upon fast and efficient response times.

Luckily, email productivity applications integrated with email, can help customer service teams minimize response time. Using a Gmail-based productivity application like Mixmax, your customer service team can create template responses to specific customer service questions. For example, if your business regularly gets questions around how the goods are packaged, you could create a template that details the packaging. Then when an email comes in, the team can respond with the template with a single click.

Building rules around template emails can make response times even faster. Using rules and sequences, your service team can build emails that are automatically sent based on specific triggers. For example, rules can be built so that once a new contract is uploaded in Dropbox, an automatic email is sent welcoming the new addition.

2. Personalize Communication to Nurture Relationships

Sixty-eight percent of customers leave your business because they think you are indifferent. Put a stop to the exodus by personalizing communication with them.

One of the most powerful ways to personalize contact is a simple one—using their name.

Many email providers offer functionality that allows you to personalize correspondence with the appropriate name and track the conversation as it unfolds.

Not only will customers feel connected—and valued—when you communicate using their name but keeping up with the conversation flow can help exceed service expectations.

3. Provide Multiple Support Choices to Emphasize Convenience

Not everyone has the time or inclination to make a phone call in order to get the support they require. That’s why it’s critical that you offer customers several options to get help when they need it.

One great way to serve customers better is to use automation to your advantage.

For example, chatbots integrated into your customer service offerings can offer significant benefits to both your team and your customers.

Over 80% of businesses currently use them to do everything from nurture leads to provide service assistance.

In fact, leads that are assisted by chatbots can get over 400% return-on-investment (ROI), which is a great way to keep customers happy—and revenue flowing.

Tie it Together with Automation for Best Results

All of the above methods of achieving greater customer satisfaction levels can be made easier—and more effective—by introducing automated workflows into the mix.

Using templates for email sequences and providing chatbots can keep response time to a minimum and free your staff to deal with more critical issues.

Good customer service experiences translate into more conversions and revenue growth.

That means adding a low-risk, high-reward product to help streamline and standardize your customer help processes makes perfect sense for the business that wants to maximize productivity, results, and revenue.