Upwork Project, 2020
A guide on how to be better at customer support.
Excellent customer responsiveness and customer service are vital parts of a successful business. When customers feel heard and valued, they will trust the company and spend more money on it. However, if customer service and responsiveness are poor, consumers tend to stop connecting with that brand altogether.
A way to keep your customers and make them your loyal buyers is to invest in outstanding customer service and improve customer responsiveness. However, before you make the necessary changes to better your services, you need to know what customer responsiveness is.
What is customer responsiveness?
When a customer reaches out to your brand’s customer support, how long do your team members respond to a query? The speed and quality of your customer response are what defines customer responsiveness. This may not look like it can affect your company greatly, but how your customer service team responds reflects on the overall image of your business.
Emails from customers that take hours or days to respond to leaves behind a bad impression to your audience. The outcome for this situation is that most likely the customer will not return and take their business elsewhere.
Customer responsiveness does not only apply to email replies but also answers to phone and social media comments and queries. In this survey, 32% of customers expect a response from social media customer support within the 30 minutes of them reaching out. Additionally, 42% of consumers anticipate being entertained by customer support within 60 minutes.
Importance of having outstanding customer responsiveness
If your customers are not satisfied with the customer responsiveness of your team, they won’t be return customers. It’s important to be aware of your audience’s issues and questions. Your team should be treating each customer as if they are the best customer they’ve had.
Repeat customers are profitable. If they are satisfied, they will keep purchasing from your company. They will buy more and buy often. According to this study, repeat customers are accountable for 40% of the average store’s annual revenue. It’s important to have amazing customer service to secure that valuable repeat customer.
As a consumer, you want to feel that the business you support cares about you and not just your money. When the company doesn’t respond to your email in time, you’ll feel like you don’t matter to them or you’re not valued. As reported by a Forrester study, 73% of United States online adults say that the best thing that a company’s customer service can do is value a consumer’s time.
9 Ways to Improve Customer Responsiveness
Now that you’re fully informed on the benefits and essence of customer responsiveness, what can you do to improve your brand’s customer responsiveness? Here are some ways on how you can enhance your customer’s experience:
1. Figure out why your customer service is doing poorly
You need to know where your weak points are in your customer service. Before you fix what is broken, you need to identify it. Do you need more employees to tend to your customer service needs? Does your website need an update?
Study how your customer service process flows and distinguish what your main issues are. To be able to improve customer responsiveness, acknowledge which parts of your business need care and attention.
2. Make a customer response system
From inquiries to reviews, every customer interaction is important and must be answered or acknowledged. For you to be able to thread all customer responses, you need to be strategic and make a system. As a starting point, you can allot a specific timeslot in which your team can solely respond to customers.
3. Talk to your social media audience
Customer service via social media is where companies either succeed or fail. You need to recognize that there are different platforms for your business. There’s Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and many more. Make the most out of these platforms by using it to connect to your audience. Social media communication with your customers builds trust.
If interacting with your customers via social media seems like a large task for your team to handle, you can outsource social media experts. They can do this task for you.
In this day and age, it’s important to not ignore the power of social media presence. If your business doesn’t have a social media account, you can pick two platforms that will work best for you and your audience. You don’t have to be on every single platform.
On Twitter, people can talk about your brand without your account being informed. In this Conversocial report, it says that only 3% of Twitter users tag a brand to ask for help. Moreover, 37% of tweets mentioning brands are customer-service related.
There’s a significant number of consumers that don’t use the ‘@’ when mentioning a brand. Customers could be talking about your brand positively or negatively without you knowing. For you to find tweets that you aren’t tagged in, simply enter your brand/company name (or common misspellings of it) on the Twitter search bar.
Even if customers don’t address their concerns or feedback to your brand’s account, you need to listen to them and respond. This gives your company plus points and makes your audience feel seen and heard.
4. Invest in tech-based solutions
A problem a lot of small businesses have regarding customer service is manpower. Their lack of employees can be the reason why excellent customer service is hard to maintain. Nowadays, there are different kinds of customer service software available to help you with customer responsiveness.
One example is a web chat software in which automated responses handle basic customer inquiries. With this additional feature, potential customers can be assisted in purchasing a product. Hereby, investing in tech-based solutions can lead to business income.
5. Hire a winning customer service team
The performance of your customer responsiveness depends on your customer service team. You need to have the right people with the right skills working for you. They should be trained to improve their skills and to be ready to handle any type of situation.
Your team should have the following skills:
• Compassion and patience:
Your team will face different kinds of customers. Some may be angry, confused, and clueless. They need to be able to handle these cases kindly, patiently, and professionally.
• Excellent communication:
Customer conversations shouldn’t end until the customer is satisfied with your service. To be able to relay this, your team should be confident with their communication skills.
• Knowledgeable:
There’s nothing more annoying than a customer service representative being as clueless as the customer they are serving. Your team should know your product/service inside and out. If they don’t, they should inform the customer that they are going to check with the corresponding team. They shouldn’t relay incorrect information.
If your team is doing a great job in satisfying and serving your customers, you can give them rewards and incentives for boosting the customer experience. This can motivate your team in achieving your customer service goals.
6. Install CRM programs
As a consumer, an aspect that can turn me off when communicating with customer support is relaying my concerns to different teams repeatedly. When your company has a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program, your team can manage customer data and build a relationship with your customers.
Benefits of having CRM:
• Provides useful insights about your customers.
• Allows you to understand your customers’ needs so that you can give a personalized experience to each customer.
• Sales and service teams can be on the same page when handling customers. This can eliminate confusion between teams.
CRM is a strategy that streamlines your company’s relationship and interactions with your customers. When a customer feels like they have a good relationship with a company, they will trust the brand and not stray to competitors.
7. Maximize omnichannel communication services
As a brand in the modern age, your customers should be able to access your business in different forms. By doing so, the quality of your customer service should be consistent along with all these platforms.
Here are some multi-channel services you can try:
• Mobile-ready customer support:
Customer support pages and features on your website should be mobile-compatible to cater to on-the-go customers.
• Social media:
Don’t ignore social media complaints and queries. Connect to your consumers on social media by improving your response time and providing effective solutions.
• FAQ pages:
For minor issues and questions, your audience often looks for solutions by themselves first before contacting customer support. Provide a clear and concise FAQ page on your website to solve common problems.
When you have all these channels implemented to your business, your company’s reliability and reputation will improve.
8. Personalize messages and replies
When a customer asks for help or inquires, they expect that a person from customer support will assist them. However, if your team mindlessly sends out a generic response as an answer to your customer, your audience may feel unimportant.
According to Forbes, 96% of marketers say that personalized messages and replies improve the brand-customer relationship. Some ways for you to personalize messages and replies are to use the recipient’s name, use an informal and friendly tone, and use the customer’s native language.
9. Provide 24/7 customer support
If you have a large customer base, customer response rate is very important. Allot a customer support department where employees can work in shifts. If you think that this can cost a fortune, you can always outsource to freelancers. Outsourcing your customer service team can save you rental space money.
A feature you can also explore is live chat. Customers prefer interacting with customer support in real-time rather than wait for an email acknowledging their issue. In a research done by Super Office, “41% of customers expect live chat on your website.” It is also proven that companies that use live chat get an increase in their revenue.
It’s important to take note that how you handle customer responsiveness can have a huge impact on your business. If you handle customer responsiveness poorly, this can cause low customer loyalty and retention. However, if you play your cards right and show that your customers are heard and valued, your business can reap the benefits and increase its revenue.
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