How you treat your customers can make or break your business. The power of customer service is irrefutable, and a business that offers good customer service is more likely to succeed. In fact, 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases from businesses that provide excellent customer service.
Customer service helps you build trust and determines how people view your business, which is especially important in the eCommerce world. Since you don’t have a physical store in which you can make a good impression, you have to rely on your customer service reps.
If you want it to be perfect, you need to know a few useful tips.
Use live chat
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One of the most important aspects of customer service is availability, as customers need to be able to reach you 24/7. According to live chat stats, 51% of consumers wish businesses were available all the time and more than one-third of consumers expect to see a live chat feature on a company’s website.
With live chat, customers can immediately get answers to their questions about your products and services at any time. Additionally, your customer support team will be able to be more productive and handle multiple conversations at the same time thanks to the software’s numerous tools.
Some benefits of live chat include:
- Building rapport with customers. When connected via live chat, agents can observe how the customer behaves and the tone they use to find the most appropriate style of communication. That way, the agents can build rapport and establish friendly relationships with all customers.
- Having access to all information. Most customers who contact your business expect your agents to know all the important details about them. Live chat provides agents with all relevant details such as the customer’s support and purchase history as well as their personal information.
- Having an advantage over competitors. Even though live chat is very useful, not many companies use it. If you do, a customer who is trying to decide between your business and a competitor will choose you because you can answer their questions immediately.
- Increasing customer engagement. People want to be able to communicate with a business through multiple channels. Some customers don’t like to use email and telephone support because they want instant support, so live chat is the perfect solution.
Implement videos
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Customer service doesn’t necessarily have to consist of an agent directly communicating with a customer. Some customers want answers but don’t want to reach out to an agent or aren’t able to do so due to communication or technical difficulties.
No matter how good your customer service communication channels are, things such as dropped telephone connections and a faulty internet connection can always happen.
If you want to make sure your customers always have an answer to the most commonly asked questions, you can provide them with those answers in an original way – through video.
Videos are a great way to provide customers with quick and non-robotic service. What’s even better, you can create these videos yourself with an online video maker. It will allow you to make creative and engaging videos in a very simple way.
Here is what you can expect if you use videos for customer service:
- Enhanced customer experience. Videos provide support to customers as soon as they visit your website. No matter what time it is or how many people are watching the same video, every customer will be able to get their answer without taking up the time of a customer service agent.
- Multi-language support. When you upload a video, you can do it in any language and also include subtitles so you can provide service to customers from all over the world.
- Lower costs. It’s much less expensive to create videos that answer the most frequently asked questions than to answer those same questions multiple times every day. Repeat customer calls take up agents’ time as well, so it’s better for them to use their time answering more complicated questions.
- Clearer instruction. Customers who reach out because they want to understand how your products are used will receive much better instructions from a video than an agent. Videos that show a step-by-step process are much clearer and more engaging.
Have a presence on social media
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A social media presence is something customers expect from businesses nowadays. It’s a great tool to stay in contact with your customers and gives you many ways to boost your customer service.
How you act on social media is very important, as 71% of customers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family. So, not only is social media important for customer satisfaction, but also customer acquisition.
Once you create profiles on multiple social media platforms, make sure to let all of your customers know you’re available to them there, as well. Most communication with customers on these platforms will happen via comments, and you need to know how to respond to each type of comment:
- Questions about products. Whenever someone leaves a comment where they have any type of question or concern, make sure to reply to it as quickly as possible.
- Positive reviews. Reviews are a great type of social proof and you should always encourage them. When a customer leaves a comment saying they’re satisfied, write a reply that shows gratitude and appreciation for their business.
- Negative reviews. Unfortunately, not everyone will be satisfied with your business and sometimes frustrated customers will leave bad reviews on your pages. When this happens, don’t ignore them. Instead, reply that you want to resolve the issue and show you’re willing to fix any problem.
Know how to finish a conversation
While it is important to keep customer support lines open as much as possible, agents should never abruptly end their conversation with one customer to answer a new call. If you don’t have a proper conclusion with a customer, this comes off as rude and disrespectful.
Leaving a couple of minutes at the end of a conversation to wrap everything up can improve the customer’s overall experience. Make sure to ask them if they need assistance with anything else and urge them to call in the future if they have any more questions.
Additionally, ask them for feedback to measure their customer satisfaction score. You can do it with simple questions such as “How satisfied were you with the service you received?” or just ask them to fill out a survey or questionnaire.
This kind of feedback is important because it gives you valuable insight into what aspects of your customer service are working and if any of them need to be improved.
And finally, don’t forget to thank the customer for their call, as a little gratitude can go a long way.
Final thoughts
There are many different things that can make a business successful. However, the one thing that’s certain is that without satisfied customers, you would never be able to make a profit.
No matter how hard you work on marketing, in the end, you need to have great customer service that will help you finalize sales, keep existing customers happy, and attract new ones.
