Catering to the customer and making them feel valuable is something that can set one company apart from the competition. Effective, approachable customer service is crucial to running any highly successful business, especially web companies. There are many websites that provide extraordinary customer service, such as Zappos and Mailchimp. However, for every company that providers great service there are at least 10 websites that provide subpar service, or no service at all (I’m looking at you, Facebook).
This is the first post in a series I’m going to write about how to provide your customers with the best service possible. Firstly, I want to look at the very basics of customer service, such as how you listen to and respond to your customers.
Response is Critical
Any time a customer states that they have a question or a problem the clock starts ticking. The quicker the response the better for the customer. Just a simple reply from a human stating that you’re aware of their situation is reassuring to a customer. If a customer has to wait several hours before hearing anything he/she can start to doubt the reliability of the company and their products.
In addition to responding quickly, you have to respond in a way that satisfies the customer. All of your hard work is for naught if the customer still leaves dissatisfied. It may not always be possible to give a customer exactly what they want, but they should still feel that you did everything you can for them. If you can’t do something for them, explain to them why you can’t; always be truthful.
Listening on Multiple Channels
Your customers are using many different channels for communication, so you have to as well. Effective customer service means monitoring not only your support ticket system, but also Twitter, your Facebook fan page, forums, and any other site where users are talking about your brand. It’s absolutely critical to know when and where you have customers that have an issue. If someone tweets that they’re having problems accessing your site then not only are you at risk of losing that customer, there’s also the chance that the user’s followers will be negatively influenced about your brand.
Here are some tools that can help you stay on top of communications about your site.
- Use Hootsuite for monitoring your Twitter accounts and Facebook pages as well as Twitter keyword searches. A customer may not @ reply to your account if they have problems, but they will almost always name your business, so keyword searches are critical.
- Google Alerts are great at giving you near real-time updates on your keyword searches. This is a great way to find users talking about your site on both large and obscure forums, as well as blog posts mentioning you.
Excellent Service vs Average Service
Here are a few differentiating factors to look for when assessing the quality of your customer service team.
- Real people vs “nameless” agents. Customers should always be able to see that they’re conversing with a real person, not someone hiding behind an alias, such as “John” or “David”. A real person has a first and last name and even has a profile picture (if your helpdesk software supports it).
- Personalized responses vs canned responses. Templates definitely have their place in the support world. I would estimate that at least 60% of all support queries are repetitive issues. That being said, make sure that your responses refer to the customer by name and includes at least some content that is not from a template.
- Waiting for responses vs closing tickets prematurely. If there is any chance that your customer will need to contact you again regarding this ticket then I recommend setting the ticket status to “pending” or something similar. It can be an off-putting experience for a customer to see that their issue has been marked “resolved” or “closed” if they do not feel that is the case.
What are your thoughts on excellent customer service? Anything else that you’d like to see added to the list or discussed in the next entry?