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Remember the time you lost something, and asked for help looking for it and heard the response, “Well, look in the place you last remember seeing it.” or something along those lines.

While that remarkably unhelpful (albeit, well-meaning) reply might meet your expectations, the same cavalier response won’t fly when it comes to customer service.

Simply put, customers expect more out of you when they need help.

What Customers Expect Out of the Service Experience

Your business makes a promise to your customers, but it’s not enough to deliver on that promise. To provide the best experience possible, you have to understand your customers’ expectations.

Luckily, meeting those expectations don’t have to be at a cost for your business. In fact, people are willing to pay more for a better experience.

How much more?

Companies that deliver top-notch experiences reap big revenue growths. Precisely 4-8% more1 than competitors in their market.

So it’s definitely worth it, but figuring out what those expectations are and how to meet them is another challenge unto itself.

While every customer base will be different and every business will have their own unique path to delivering the experience, there are some universal faux-pas that no customer service department should commit.

5 Things that Ruin the Service Experience When Customers Need Help

To help you capitalize on revenue growth and improve your customer experience, we’ve compiled a short list of things that your customers don’t want to run into when they’re trying to get help from your service team.

1. Repeating Themselves to Every Agent

If a customer can’t take care of their problem with a single agent and has to work across the team, they don’t want to repeat themselves. Every minute that they have to spend explaining their problem again, is another minute that their problem isn’t being fixed.

Similarly, they don’t want to be told to try solutions they’ve already found on their own.

If it didn’t work for them when they were reading the help documentation, it probably won’t work when the service agent is parroting the same instructions, either.

Luckily, if your helpdesk has journey mapping, you can mitigate this challenge by keeping your agents — and customer — on the same page with a unified system.

2. Playing the Waiting Game

Customer expectations are rising, and if you’re not resolving tickets fast enough, you may not be meeting those heightened expectations. 67% of customers2 expect your service to be faster in 2018.

Instant is best, but it’s not always viable over more asynchronous channels like social media and email.

In the case of email, 44% of your customers3 expect a response to their query within a few hours at the most.

Fortunately, that still leaves over half of them with the far more realistic expectation of a response within a business day or two, but it still puts the clock against your agents.

A clock which doesn’t let up with your synchronous channels like live chat and phone lines.

In fact, both present the same logistical hurdle for your business. If you don’t have the funds to staff up according to the demand, you’ll need to designate specific hours of service so customers know when they can reach instant help.

Which means they’ll still be playing the waiting game — it’s just one where they’ll know the parameters of the board.

Alternatively, you can avoid this faux pas altogether by getting a little more technologically advanced and using AI-powered support agents for your live chat. Chatbots don’t need rest, don’t collect a salary, and can be programmed to address the most common issues.

They can also help users find information in your knowledge base and get to their solution faster.

Don’t make your customers play the waiting game. The faster they can take care of their issues, the closer you are to meeting their expectations.

3. Going on an Archeological Dig for Your Support Team

If your helpdesk is buried in the wilds of your website, customers aren’t going to be happy about having to dig through it to find it.

They’ll be even less thrilled about having to work through automated channels before they can get to a real person.

That’s why websites like GetHuman exist, and rank well on the search engine results page.

Ranking in the top ten — behind only Target itself — sends a clear message that searchers want human-to-human communication as quickly as they can get it.

In fact, 73% of your customers4 would rather get help from a live person than anything else.

So while you should offer automated support, you should also make it simple for them to connect to your agents by putting your contact information front and center on your website.

It’s even better if it’s in multiple locations, such as in your top navigation and footer menu.

Testing the visibility of your support information is pretty easy.

Just squint your eyes. If you can’t identify where your support information is within a few seconds of squinting, it’s not visible enough.

And believe it or not, this is a bonafide design test5 that user experience experts use to ensure visual elements are clear and organized in the correct hierarchy.

So don’t make your users strap on a pith helmet to find your service department, and if you’re unsure if your contact information is clear, run the squint test.

It’s a small step, but for someone who needs help, it’s a big impact.

4. Training Your Customer Service Staff Themselves

Eventually, everyone has to exit the training seminar and start taking live calls. But if you’re not preparing your agents ahead of time with the resources and confidence they need, you put the onus to train your staff on the experience.

And for a customer with a problem to solve, that’s an additional frustration. While the may be willing to help a fledgling agent out when they have a sales call, their patience will be decidedly more strained if they need support.

It’s also more likely to burn out your staff and lead to a higher turnover rate in an already tumultuous industry. If you want to retain your staff longer, you need to put the extra time and expense into training them thoroughly.

Remember, customers are willing to pay more for a better experience, but they can’t get that experience if your newest agents are being thrust into the highest-escalation cases before they’re ready.

But like all of the previous faux pas, this is another thing that’s surprisingly easy to solve and avoid. Even just adding two extra days of orientation can put your staffers in a better position to provide service and enmesh them in the company culture.

And if they feel supported, they’ll be able to transfer that support to the people who matter most — your customers.

So give your newest agents time to stretch their legs and get into the groove of customer service.

Start by adding additional training time, then regularly check-in with your staffers to make sure they have everything they need before they work with high-stakes customers on a deadline.

5. Not Getting an Apology

Your agents first course of action when a customer populates a ticket is to solve the problem and resolve the ticket as quickly as possible.

But while expediency and a solutions-first focus is a definite boon for great customer experience, neglecting the small things can have surprisingly large impacts.

Like forgetting to add a sincere but brief apology for their experience.

Just make sure your apology is straightforward like Adweek’s and doesn’t take more time than it needs to or come with any caveats. If your customer service agents add an interjection, “We’re sorry about your experience, but…” it’s less likely to be warmly received.

Psychologist Harriet Lerner says7 that any apology that includes a rationalization negates the sincerity of the sentiment.

Your agents shouldn’t try to explain what went wrong or provide an excuse, even inadvertently. They should just apologize and move on to addressing the problem.

It’s what you’d want someone to do for you, isn’t it?

Ultimately, customer expectations are always going to keep growing, and meeting them is critical to keeping your business in best possible form, delivering the best experience to customers. Following the steps mentioned above, is definitely a sure-fire way to do just that.

What is customer service management?

At a conference in 1997, Steve Jobs famously said this in response to a provocative question from one of the audience members about the company’s strategy at the time:

You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.

Today, many companies have forgotten that the essence of running a business starts with the customer. The idea behind being successful at customer service management is to build and execute a strategy that revolves around a clear philosophy, a plan of action, and choosing the right technology stack that supports those plans.

The 5-step customer service management plan for your business

1. Building a robust and scalable support team
The first step in your journey of establishing customer service management is putting together your very own A-team. There are two parts to this: hiring and training. Let’s take a look at both

Part 1: Hiring the right personnel for the job

People are your most important resource, especially when it comes to customer service. Here’s what you should look for when hiring service reps:

Social skills

Empathy: We start off with what’s probably the most important quality to look for when hiring a support associate. Empathy is crucial because it makes it easier for your agents to put themselves in the customer’s shoes and handle difficult conversations better.

Patience: Customer service reps are often in high-stress situations, with tight deadlines and high customer expectations. However, presenting a calm, helpful demeanor can diffuse even the hardest situations. Having the patience to listen and respond appropriately to situations is an important skill to possess.

Persuasiveness: A support rep needs to be an effective communicator. This is not limited to just getting a message across clearly but ensuring that message is persuasive and reassures customers who might not be in the right frame of mind.

Hard skills

Decision making: Customer service reps have to make important decisions in a short period of time when dealing with issues. It could be having to allow a concession or even taking a call on whether an issue needs external support.

Logical thinking: Keeping a calm head and making calculated decisions is necessary for support reps to analyze situations and solve problems efficiently.

Knowledge management: Customer support associates need to have the capacity to acquire and absorb essential information about company policy, support processes, etc., to provide customers with the best possible solutions.
Part 2: Defining roles and responsibilities

The next step in customer service management is creating well-defined roles for your team members. These roles will depend on the size and scale of your customer service team. But in general, these are the primary members you’ll need:

Customer service/support associate: The customer service associate or representative is the first line of offense and defense for your organization, making them the most important member of your team. They deal with day to day complaints, handle different channels, and reroute high priority issues to the right personnel.

Customer support engineer: The support engineer is usually a domain expert or a product specialist who can deal with complex or technical issues that require bug finding or troubleshooting.

Customer support lead/manager: The manager oversees the work being carried out by support engineers and service reps while also stepping in for critical issues as necessary.

Technical account manager: The technical account manager or TAM is a special role within the support team, where he or she is in charge of one or more large customer accounts that require special attention because of the size of the account.

Support operations analyst: The support operations analyst/ helpdesk analyst’s primary responsibility is to analyze performance and productivity data to help managers make hiring and operational decisions.

Head of support: The director of support heads the entire customer service department. Their responsibilities span from strategizing a plan of action, understanding resource management, and ensuring the quality of customer experience.

2. Training programs and shift management

Regardless of how big or small they are, all support teams need to be trained on how to interact with customers. Training programs will vary based on the company as well as the customer service philosophy but forms the crux of the quality of customer service management. But here are some aspects you’ll need to train new hires on:

Support process: What is the workflow your company follows when it comes to solving customer issues? What are the different levels of support? What queries are classified as low or high priority? Answers to these questions are what support reps need to know before starting their work every day.

Channel classification: Identifying the channels of communication most relevant to your business/target customer is critical to getting CX right. Once you have that in place, train your support reps on the tone of voice and communication etiquette for each of these channels. For example, chat & social media conversations will both have very different conversational tones, while phone and emails continue to have a more formal tone.

Crisis training: Situational awareness can only get you so far. Support associates need to know how to handle high priority issues where customer and business revenues are on the line. Crisis training is a great practice to prepare team members for such scenarios so as to minimize improvisation and maximize the effectiveness of problem-solving.
The second thing support teams need to figure out is shift timings. There are various shift schedules and customer service models you can use based on the volume of queries your team supports. Here are just a few examples:

Follow the sun model: Follow the sun model is based on the principle of spreading your customer service team across several locations around the world. This is effective when you have to provide 24/7 support but also have a global presence.

Traditional 24/7 model: The most commonly used support model where call centers are present in the same geographic region, and there is a handoff between different shifts.

Remote/distributed model: A fast emerging model of support because of both situational factors and the flexibility it offers in terms of team members being spread out and being able to work from any location.

3. KRAs and performance management

Keeping track of how well your team is doing helps identify the strengths and weaknesses in your customer service management process. Having certain KRAs and KPIs in place helps you continuously measure performance and ensures you keep improving your support processes. Here are a few parameters and metrics that can help set benchmarks and standards for your support team.

External/Customer facing metrics

Customer feedback is the most crucial tool in your arsenal. Without understanding what the customer thinks, you can’t move forward. Here are three important customer metrics you can measure:

CSAT: The most commonly used metric across industries and businesses to measure customer feedback. CSAT is a simple survey tool where customers can rate their experience on a scale of 1-10.

NPS: NPS or net promoter score is a great metric to measure and understand customer loyalty. The question “ How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?” is presented to customers who have to respond on a scale of 1-10. Customers who respond with a rating between 9-10 are protractors or advocates of your company, 0-6 are detractors, and those who respond with 7 or 8 are passive or neutral.

CES: Customer effort score is a relatively new metric that takes into account how easy or difficult the experience was for the customer and how much time and effort they had to put in during the whole process. In the survey, customers are asked: “On a scale of ‘very easy’ to ‘very difficult’ how easy was your interaction with our company.”

Internal support metrics

Analyzing your team’s performance is as important to maintaining service quality as is gathering customer feedback. To understand who’s doing well and who needs help, here are some metrics you can measure:

First contact resolution: Measures the percentage of issues resolved by the agent on the first contact or conversation with the customer.

Ticket volume: Measures the number of tickets your team receives on a monthly or weekly basis and is one of the factors that go into demand forecasting and hiring

Average response time: A metric that tells you how long it takes on average for an agent to respond to a customer query.

Average resolution time: Measures the average time it takes an agent or support team to close out a customer issue.

4. The role of the customer service manager

The customer service manager has to play both a strategic and operational role while enabling the support team to achieve their goals. Lets breakdown what responsibilities that translate into:

Agent roles assignment: The manager is responsible for assessing the skills of agent hires and assigning them the right roles and the right channels to handle.

Shift Schedule management: A very critical role the customer service manager plays is that of deciding shift timings and schedules based on volumes, availability, and other factors.
Hiring & staffing: The customer service manager needs to have one eye on his team’s performance and support volumes so he can hire new employees beforehand.

Performance review: The manager needs to keep track of overall group performance as well as customer feedback and take the necessary steps to ensure consistency of customer service.
Incident/escalation management: When there is a major issue that junior members of the team cannot handle on their own, the manager needs to be able to step in and resolve the issue swiftly and efficiently.

Stakeholder review: Monthly or quarterly reviews will be conducted with the head of support and other important stakeholders where the manager needs to give his valuable input so the right strategic decisions can be made,

5. Choosing the right tech stack

We now come to the last piece of the puzzle — deciding on your support tech stack. Technology can make a lot of the operational and administrative work simple while giving organizations greater visibility into their support processes.

But the biggest reason the right tech stack cannot be overlooked is because agents who are on the frontlines are the biggest beneficiaries. With that, here are some of the features/functionalities you need to consider when choosing customer service software:

Self-service: Having self-service options such as a knowledge base or an FAQ can be extremely helpful for both customers and agents. For customers, it’s a way to find out information for themselves without having to contact an agent or wait in a call queue. You can also build an internal knowledge base for agents to refer to when looking for quick answers to repetitive questions.

Omnichannel: Email and phone might still be popular channels for support teams, but they’re not always the right support channel because your customers sometimes prefer modern channels like chat and social media. Therefore it’s important to have the right mix of channels that match your customer needs. A customer service software like Freshdesk lets you choose the channels you want your customers to engage on.

Chatbots & messaging: Millennial customers today want responses instantly, and the best way to achieve that speed is through messaging integrated with AI and chatbots. With chatbots, you can set up automated workflows to take care of status requests or help customers get refunds on orders. Freshworks’s Freddy AI-powered chatbot helps your team accomplish such tasks and more.

Reporting and analytics: The last feature that will complete the essentials of your support tech stack is a reporting and analytics tool. Having the ability to build customized dashboards and reports to generate actionable insights into your support performance is the most effective way to improve and scale your team. Freshdesk has an inbuilt analytics tool that makes it simple to measure and collate all the essential metrics for any support team.

How good customer service management can earn CS leaders a seat at the table

Customer service management has become a highly discussed topic of late because of how the world has changed dramatically, especially in 2020. CXOs across businesses are looking to their customer service teams to gain insights into customer behavior to modify their approach to selling products and services and build better relationships with customers.

In 2021 and beyond, we’ll see more organizations adding someone from the customer service department to the decision-making table because their input is now arguably one of the most important ones when making strategic decisions going forward.

There’s no lack of marketing channels available today. Whether a brand is looking to reach customers online or through more traditional methods, there are plenty of options to choose from. In fact, it seems like every week there’s a new channel being touted as the next big thing.

And while keeping up to speed with these developments is a wise choice, it’s important not to let them completely overshadow tried-and-true methods of acquiring and retaining customers. One of these is customer service. Excellent customer service is a necessity for every business, regardless of industry or business model.

And though it may not be a marketing channel in the traditional sense, it can play a significant role in whether potential customers choose to purchase from or work with your business.

How Does Customer Service Play a Role in Marketing?

Some marketers focus their efforts solely on acquiring new customers. That’s a mistake — both from a growth standpoint and from a financial one. Growth is a top goal for many businesses, but it’s impossible to achieve steady growth if you’re struggling to keep the customers you already have.

Plus, when you consider that it costs 6-7x more to attract a new customer than it does to retain an existing one, focusing on retention could help you achieve the same size customer base at a much lower cost. It simply doesn’t make sense not to prioritize converting your customers into loyal buyers.

And customer service plays a major role in this process. According to a survey from Temkin Group, 86% of customers who rate a company’s customer service as “excellent” will repurchase from that company.

That number drops to 13% for customers who have a “very poor” experience. That’s less than one-sixth of the repeat purchases generated by excellent service. It’s also worth noting that 77% of consumers who have an excellent customer service interaction say they’re likely to recommend the brand to others, while only 7% of those who have a poor experience will.

From an acquisition standpoint, this is huge. If your service is currently lacking, stepping it up could make a serious difference in how willing your customers are to spread the word about your company.

And considering that those recommendations have the potential to translate into sales, it’s clear that customer service can have a significant impact on your ability to reach your marketing goals.

4 Ways to Make Customer Service Part of Your Marketing Strategy

If you haven’t yet integrated your approaches to customer service and marketing, there’s no better time to start than now. But adapting your strategy means more than merely offering great customer service. With that in mind, here are 4 tips to help you get started.

1. Use Support as an Acquisition Channel

Many businesses believe that their support team’s sole purpose is to answer questions and address concerns from current customers and clients. And to be clear, these are important functions that aid in customer satisfaction and retention. But you can also take things a step further by utilizing support as an acquisition channel.

For example, e-commerce platform Kajabi offers live chat support for all of their site visitors. While current customers can log in and ask questions specific to their accounts, prospective customers see the following default message after clicking the live chat icon.

If they’re interested in learning more, they can instantly message the company’s support team with any questions. This gives the brand the opportunity to speak directly with a lead and provide a more tailored explanation of their product.

It also has the potential to turn a standard site visit into a conversation — and increases the chances that each visitor finds the information they need to take the next step in the company’s sales funnel.

2. Make it Easy for Customers to Get in Touch

Even the best service strategy can only be effective if your team has the opportunity to help current and prospective customers. And while you may think it’s entirely your customers’ responsibility to initiate conversation, it’s essential to make that process as easy as possible.

After all, the more convenient it is for customers to contact you, the more likely they’ll be to get in touch when they have a question or problem. With that in mind, it’s a good idea to make your contact page easily accessible from every other page on your site.

If you have the resources available, it’s also in your best interest to offer multiple support channels. At the very minimum, email and phone support are widely considered standard — but your options don’t end there.

The company offers phone, live chat, and email support, with separate channels for specific departments, like designer specialists, wedding stylists, and personal stylists.

And while offering this many options may not be feasible (or even necessary) for smaller businesses, it’s a prime example of the type of support today’s consumers have come to expect — making it all the more important to provide your customers with a seamless experience.

3. Highlight Your Customer Service as a Benefit

Top-notch customer service could be exactly what it takes to turn a customer into a loyal brand supporter. But you don’t need to wait for them to run into an issue to see that value. Today’s consumers know that customer service can make or break their experience with a company, so highlighting what sets your approach apart can be a major selling point.

Does your company offer 24/7 support? Do you guarantee a response within a specific amount of time? Does your customer support team have an exceptionally high CSAT score? These are all indicators of excellent customer service and can be precisely what you need to differentiate your brand from your competitors — making them potentially valuable additions to your marketing campaigns.

For example, hosting company Bluehost offers 24/7 support, which features prominently in their marketing campaigns. In fact, it appears twice on their homepage alone.

This is likely a compelling selling point to prospective customers who are concerned about server problems, downtime, maintenance, and other technical issues.

So if there’s anything that sets your service and supports apart from your competitors’, make sure prospective customers know that from the start — and it just might be the factor that tips the scale in your favor.

4. Use Customer Reviews as Marketing Materials

Telling your audience about the excellent level of service you provide is a great start. Letting them hear about that service from other customers is even better. Of course, featuring testimonials and reviews isn’t a revolutionary marketing strategy. In fact, there’s a good chance you’ve already incorporated them on your own site.

Still, if you want to illustrate the value of your customer service, few are more compelling than letting prospective customers hear from people who’ve experienced it firsthand. And your approach doesn’t need to be complicated to be effective.

Each one includes the user’s real Twitter handle, so there’s no question as to their authenticity. And if you’re looking for a straightforward way to incorporate your customer service into your marketing strategy, this could be the easiest approach.

First, start by asking your customers for honest feedback. If it’s positive, ask for permission to share it. And if not, view it as constructive criticism you can use to improve your customer service — and, as a result, your ability to acquire and maintain customers.

Customers are a group of people so diverse you shouldn’t be able to categorize them. And yet figuring out the types of customers is one of the first steps of a successful business strategy.

If you search for your brand name on review websites or social media, you’ll get several different reviews & reactions to your products and services from customers. Now combine that with the purchase history of a select few of those customers in the last 6 months, and you might see a few patterns emerging.

These patterns will help you answer the following questions.

• How often do customers buy from you?
• What are they saying about your product on public forums?
• Are they happy with your customer service?

By categorizing the above information, you’ll be able to list down a few customer types. While this is an approximation, it gives you a good starting point to understanding your customer base better

Why should you identify the different types of customers?

What are the advantages of understanding these customer types? Well, there are primarily two reasons to dive into the different types of customer you deal with daily:

Prioritization: Customers are not all equal, and that’s ok. While you owe every single customer a seamless experience and easy access to support, the truth is, there are bound to be customers who are loyal to you, have made higher-value purchases, and bring in more business through referrals. It’s good business to prioritize these customers and deliver an elevated experience.

Personalization: Every customer type is different. So the strategy you use either to serve them or when you are trying to win them over will be different. Understanding what kind of customer you are dealing with helps you personalize your strategy.

Types of customers, their personality traits, and creating a strategy

The three teams that usually have to directly or indirectly deal with customers are customer service, sales, and marketing. These teams interact with customers at different stages of the sales funnel, and the types of customer interaction changes based on what stage of the cycle it took place in. Since ‘Sales & Marketing” are usually the first team to interact with prospects/customers, we’ll begin with them, followed by Support’ customer types.

Sales & Marketing

A customer’s journey begins even before they become your customers. Their first touchpoint is with the marketing team, usually as prospects. Understanding different personas and then creating messaging to target them makes it necessary for the marketing team to understand the types of customers they are dealing with, identify potential challenges and draw them in with a convincing narrative. Then it’s the job of the sales team to decode every specific need of each persona and then pitch a compelling proposition to convert them into customers. Here are the types of customers that you’ll encounter during the purchase and pre-purchase stages

1.Free Customers:

These are the types of customers who are giving your product or service a trial run before deciding whether it’s worth the money. Some examples are users who sign up for free versions of a product or service or only use open-source software.

Personality traits

• Curious
• Cost-conscious

Winning them over: Free users consist of both potential customers as well as those that are merely looking around. Being able to distinguish between them is the first task for your marketing and sales teams to be able to personalize their offers.

Once you’ve accomplished that, use the right pricing and packaging of your paid plans to entice free users to upgrade to paid plans. Shifting a feature or two from the free program to the paid plan could also help convert more users to paying customers

2.New Customers:

These customers are buying from you for the first time. They’ve come to you either because of marketing efforts or peer recommendations. Making a good first impression is important because it validates the reason they chose your company.

Personality traits

• Expectant
• Uncertain

Winning them over

The key to making an excellent first impression is to explain the value of choosing your product or service offering and then following that up with delivering that value. This means convincing the customer that your product is the right choice to solve their most pressing problems. You should also have a smooth onboarding process so that the customer receives complete information consisting of company stories, product tutorials, etc.

3.Bargain Customers:

Bargain or discount customers are the most difficult to negotiate with. They are always looking for a cut-price deal. Most of their decision making during the consideration stage of their buying journey comes down to cost.

Personality traits

• Price hagglers
• Hard negotiators

Winning them over

There are a couple of ways to hook even the hardest bargainer. While this might seem like a problematic type of customer, bargain customers provide an excellent opportunity to flex your marketing and sales team’s creativity in converting these customers.

Entice them to buy a plan that ties them down to a more extended period if it’s a subscription model that you are using. Make them see more value in a lower yearly subscription plan as compared to a monthly one. This guarantees you a higher LTV and a revenue stream.

4.Informed Customers:

Informed buyers are comprehensive. They come prepared, armed with extensive knowledge built through research before even entering a store or talking to a sales representative. When negotiating or trying to pitch a sale to these types of customers, you’ll have to be as thorough as they are. If your product is not in their consideration, set its a herculean task to make them even glance your way.

Personality traits

• Detail-oriented
• Thorough and methodical

Winning them over

The best way to win over highly informed customers is to have subject matter experts to vouch for your product or service being offered. While they might be familiar with most of the essential details of what you have to offer, a deeper understanding of your domain shows them what you are talking about.

5.Impulse Customers:

mpulse buying both in the online and physical purchasing world is still an intriguing psychological concept that companies try to take advantage of through various techniques. The impulse buyer always makes unplanned purchases that are triggered through sudden, unpredictable urges or needs. But sometimes they may need a small push to trigger that impulse.

Personality traits

• Big spenders
• Consumerist mindset
• Easily swayed

Triggering the impulse

Marketing teams play a significant role in getting buyers to purchase items on a whim. Flash sales and limited-time offers are two prevalent and effective impulse triggers. Discounts are the most mainstream impulse buying triggers. A popular discount strategy is incentivizing a purchase by promising a discount on certain items during the customer’s next visit. You’ll come across these both in stores and online shopping.

Customer support

Once customers complete their purchase, customer service teams become the primary point of contact. The types of traits and personalities support teams deal with are different because customers have different expectations during post-sale stages. Adapting to which kind of customer you talk to is a necessary skill. Here are the different types of customers they will encounter and how you should handle them.

1.Loyal Customers:

This first type is a unique scenario where both sales and support play an equally important role. Loyal customers are the types you know and love. Your brand is the first name they think about when it comes to buying a product or service in your industry. You’ve achieved customer loyalty by providing great value through your offerings and your customer service.

Personality Traits

• Preference for Quality
• Consistency
• Repetitive & Habituated

Retention strategy

What’s important with loyal customers is how you handle them after they’ve become your customers. The number of choices consumers have today is the highest it’s ever been. This makes it even harder to retain them.

Keep them up to date with launches or new features about your product regularly. If the customer has a higher share of wallet, you can assign dedicated account managers and customer success managers to ensure they get the attention they are paying for. Eventually, you can ask them to be part of case studies, customer success stories, or testimonials to improve your brand image.

The entire customer experience matters, and therefore marketing sales and customer support have to work together to maintain the relationship.

2.Satisfied Customers:

These are your best customers because they are thrilled with your service. They rarely give negative reviews because your company has managed to satisfactorily exceed all their service expectations.

Personality Traits

• Friendly
• Polite
• Understanding

Your strategy

Do what you’re doing to keep them happy. Keep providing excellent customer service and always give them priority when required. These are your best customers and advocates, so you must do everything in your power to satisfy their requests.

Level of support

Personal Manager/ Senior support agents

3.Curious Customers:

These are customers who always have a lot of questions for your support team. Either because they are new to the product or because they just require a lot of assistance in general. You’ll see that most of their questions are basic or informational and can get repetitive.

Personality traits

• Need constant help
• Ask fundamental questions

Your strategy

When dealing with curious customers, patience is key. Train your agents to listen to customer queries and respond with elaborate answers that give them all the information they need. You can also take the opportunity to record some of the more frequently asked questions and build solution articles that customers can access on your website. This way, you can reduce the number of common complaints you get and also improve your Knowledge Base and Self-service capabilities.

Level of support

Junior agents / Chatbot/ Self-Service

4.Demanding Customers:

Not to be confused with unhappy customers, these people expect the best level of service every time they contact you. Your support team will always have to be on their toes when dealing with these types of customers. If your level of service falls below their expectations, they might not give you a second chance.

Personality traits

• Impatient
• High expectations

Your strategy

The best way to handle demanding customers is to work on a request to request basis. Provide the service they are looking for without any delays. It’s not possible to be perfect all the time but place them as high as possible on your priority list. Over time, by delivering a consistent experience, they’ll gain your trust and build a rapport with you.

Level of support

Senior support or associate Manager

5.Disgruntled Customers:

They are the most challenging customer type to have a conversation with. They might have had a bad experience in the past or weren’t satisfied with the product or service you are offering. Long wait times, or having to regularly phone customer service only to be put on hold are all examples of bad service experiences they could have encountered.

Personality traits

• Angry
• Unhappy
• Frustrated

Your strategy

You’ll have to tread carefully when faced with disgruntled customers because one misstep and they might churn or even worse, talk about their negative experience on social media, which is the last thing you want.

Here’s where customer empathy becomes essential. You have to put yourself in their shoes and really understand where they’re coming from. Once you’ve done that, craft a meaningful apology followed by the reassurance that their problem will be solved. Back this up by taking action swiftly and fixing the problem. Don’t forget to send a final follow up saying that such a scenario will not happen again.

Level of support

Senior support associate/Manager

6.Unknown:

There are certain types of customers who don’t fall into any category, as it’s difficult to interpret their interactions. They don’t really give away what they feel about your service or your products. Possible reasons for this could be that they don’t have the time, or they see it as a purely transactional conversation. Not being able to figure out what kind of customer they are can be a problem, especially when it comes to feedback. They might be customers who are actually unhappy but don’t really reflect it in customer surveys, giving only neutral responses.

Personality traits

Unknown

Your strategy

There really isn’t a specific way to identify this type of customer, but you can try different surveying techniques apart from measuring customer satisfaction. One such metric called Customer Effort Score or CES – measures how easy or difficult a service interaction is for the customer. Unlike the CSAT survey, this gives a more holistic picture of the experience and can lead to better responses for your surveys.

Level of support

Junior support agent

Understanding Customer Types is a Habit of Successful Companies

Gathering as much information as possible on your customers should be a daily exercise. Companies like Amazon, Zappos, JetBlue have been built on the concept of customer obsession. While it’s not easy to reach that level of perfection, creating these customer profiles and catering to their specific needs goes a long way in keeping customers happy. With a wealth of options for consumers, building a segment based strategy is the key to customer retention.

You might be holding back from a much-needed price increase because you’re afraid to make your customers angry. Yes, it’s true that no one wants to suddenly have to pay more, but inflation is a very real thing and it is possible to increase your pricing in a way that your customer base will understand.

There are a number of methods that you can employ to help ease the customer into price differences, making sure that there is little to no drop off or damage to your brand’s image.

Here’s how to inform customers about price changes without affecting their experience with your brand.

Why you shouldn’t be afraid to change prices

When you study a comparison of price increases against consumer happiness, you’ll start to notice a trend that should come as no shock: the more your price increases, the greater impact there is on customer happiness.

Price Intelligently was quick to point out the main lesson that we should all take away from this is not that price increases are inherently bad, but that incremental raises, which are carefully planned and communicated to an audience, have a lower risk of upsetting loyal customers.

Companies that start out at an extremely low price (or freemium model) are often forced by circumstances to make a sudden, large jump. When dealing with consumer perception it’s important to remember that all price increases will inevitably be compared to the former price. If there’s a huge gap between the old and new prices without a considered reason, then consumers will feel cheated, even if the new prices keep to market norms.

This can potentially be solved by a principle known as anchoring.

Anchoring is often seen at work when you’re looking at pricing pages that showcase several options. The highest option would be considered the “anchor” and serves to make the others seem more reasonable.

When applied to price increases, the anchor is the past price. When you’re starting at a low price, it limits your ability to raise it—even if you are still charging far less than your competitors.

Price Intelligently explains this concept by saying, “If you anchor people at a low price and raise it dramatically, then no one will see it as getting new value. They’ll see it as gouging.” Price gouging is something that will severely tarnish your brand. You’ll want to avoid even the perception of it.

When accused of price gouging, you run the risk of not only seeing a significant drop off with potential customer, you also risk losing the customers you originally won with lower pricing.

Catching up with higher-priced competitors is very possible, however, you may need to do so over time.

This specific challenge pops up a lot for companies that utilize a “freemium model,” wherein users expect to pay nothing, and then suddenly you start to charge them. Even when that sudden charge is a nominal amount, like say 99 cents, you’ve still triggered a severe psychological hurdle that is difficult to overcome.

Netflix is a perfect example of how to institute a price change with little to no issues. One of the single largest streaming services on the planet, Netflix made headlines after announcing a big price increase for their plans and experts predicted a sharp drop in subscribers as a result of this move.

However, despite that revelation, their stock was soaring when the dust settled. Netflix’s stock rose by 6% following the company’s announcement that it would be implementing price changes immediately for any new customers and spacing the increase out over three months for existing subscribers.

This is not the first time that this has happened. In fact, it is a fairly consistent occurrence whenever Netflix raises its prices.

Their most recent change occurred in October 2017, which saw Netflix’s stock rise 3% on the same day and did not result in a loss of subscribers. In fact, Netflix said that its subscriber pool had actually grown by 10.7% year over year despite increases. It currently has a whopping 58 million subscribers in the U.S. alone and 78 million internationally.

Be Transparent About the Change

If there’s one thing modern customers appreciate, it is transparency. It is one of the major things that they want to see in the companies that they do business with.

As such, if you are going to be increasing prices you must be prepared to open up to the public about it and explain the “whens and the whys.” The single worst action your company could take would be to launch an increase without a word and let it come as a surprise when your customers take a look at their credit card bills.

When addressing such a situation, make sure that you remember to show empathy to the customer and their situation.

If it makes sense, you can also share the many steps that your company has taken over the years to keep pricing down. Showing them the various ways that you’ve already cut your costs will help them understand that this increase is the only way to maintain the quality and service that they have come to expect.

Finally, communicate the change before it happens – one of the best ways to show transparency regarding a price increase is to send out an email. One mass email is usually enough to make your case and inform the customers. Your brand will come out looking better for it in the end.

Remind Them What They’re Paying For (And Why it’s Worth It)

There’s one tried and true sales tactic that you should always remember to fall back on: Proving Value.

You need to have a provable reason to assure your customers that the price increase will be reflected in the value of your product. When new prices are announced, focus on reinforcing your key values. You have to remind customers why they have chosen to do business with you. That will make it easier for them to swallow the new pricing.

When you’re making the price increase announcement, it’s a good idea to subtly remind your audience that paying just a small amount of additional money for a service that they have expressed love for is not a big deal.

This will ring true if you are also adding more value to the product that complements the increase. There is no customer in the world that wants to pay more money for an inferior product. That is why you have to provide them with an incentive through value.

There is a logic that stands behind all price increases. This simple truth can be communicated effectively to customers. Increasing the price of a good or service allows you to offer it at a price that is still a better value than that of your competitors. Thanks to the price increase at hand, you will be able to continue offering this service in a way that is sustainable for the future.

Sustainability is the key component of a price increase. Small increases can be used to adjust to changing conditions. That, in turn, fosters increased innovation. By increasing your prices slowly, you’re protecting against future trouble and the embarrassment of having to bail yourself out with massive price increases.

A business that focuses on sustainability and fostering a positive reputation for seeking out sustainability is something that anyone can understand. Proving value and not getting greedy will earn you some serious points with your audience when it is time to announce.

Offer a Variety of Price Points

If you’re selling a product or service for a set amount, with additional costs attached to add-ons such as updates and support, it might make sense to offer three versions of the same solution at different price points.

While it might seem like you will only have customers who take the lowest possible price, this will even itself out. This is simply because when you offer fewer add-ons on a cheaper plan, you will save on resources being used on those customers.

You will also have some customers who will want the higher-priced service. One thing to remember: you should always be testing all of the changes that you are making. No one will buy the cheapest option in some markets. In others, however, you will have a harder time selling the highest priced option.

There is a quick and cost-effective test that you can institute. Start by creating two different options for your product or service. The first one would be your current offer. For the second, try to add something on top of the original offer that increases value while increasing the price. Even try to double it, if you can.

Once the offer is on the table, start to watch your stats and observe customer behavior. Figure out how many customers are choosing the more expensive option. For every person that does, you’ve just doubled your profits!

Reward Loyal Buyers and Offer Bundled Discounts

By turning to research and real-world experience you can confirm one simple fact; customers want to feel as though they are appreciated by the companies that they do business with.

You can prove to your customers that you value their business, which in turn will soften the blow of a price increase. This can be achieved by informing them that you are rewarding their past commitment by temporarily delaying the price increase that your other customers have to face. Give them a decent period of time such as six months or a year at the old price point to really drive this point home. When the discount window expires, you will be able to raise the price and your loyal customers will have had ample time to mentally adjusted to the change.

Getting repeat buyers requires a completely different mindset. You’ll need to use these discounts to encourage brand loyalty instead of enticing new people to try your products for the first time. This kind of discount is usually implemented through some kind of loyalty program for current customers.

According to research from Colloquy, 55% of people who enroll in loyalty programs do so to receive discounts on their purchases.

Another popular tactic that you could use would be to offer discounts that will cancel out the price increase.

When you raise your prices, some of your very price-conscious customers may fall off. The best way to make sure that you keep a portion of them is to raise your prices but offer occasional discounts and deals that bring your price back down to their original level.

While some of the more frugal members of your audience will use these discounts, many of your less frugal customers won’t even bother. That means that you will still be able to reap the rewards of people who are paying full price while continuing to keep your more bargain-oriented shoppers happy.

Beardbrand, for example, a company that creates beard care products, offers a number of discounted bundles. They are made up of different varieties of the same product type but the products are cheaper when you buy them all together. Customers can try out some different varieties of the same products to find out which one they like the best, or they could change up the scents that they use daily.

So, why should you bundle your products? There are a few reasons.

1. Bundling Increases the Number of Items That You Will Sell – You’re selling several items within one order, which means that each sale equates to more items being sold. That means you’re getting more revenue per order plus lower costs per order. Businesses seeking to increase the number of items that they are selling, or their overall revenue regardless of the margins will find the bundled sale to be a good option.

2. You Can Sell Some of the Popular and Less Popular Products Together – Bundles give you the ability to sell less popular products alongside some of your stronger selling products. That means you can leverage the popularity of some of your best-selling items by convincing customers to buy it along with other items on a discount.

3. Customers Get to Try Your Other Products – If some of your other products are of equal or superior quality to some of your most popular ones, you can encourage customers to try them by bundling them. It’s important to track and measure the sales of some of these less popular varieties to see if they’ll increase after the discount is concluded.

Conclusion

Let’s face it, no one likes a price increase. It’s a tumultuous time that, if handled poorly, could pit business against customer and do irreparable damage to the brand. However, by utilizing the above steps, you not only show your customers why a price increase is needed but you show them respect in the process and let them know that they matter.

By being transparent, hyping up value, offering a variety of price points, and instituting loyalty programs and bundled services you could make it through your price increase more profitable than ever.

It’s no secret that how well you serve customers will define your company’s long term success. In fact, great customer service leads to better customer loyalty, higher revenue, and lower costs. But if you have to focus on the customer and become a service-oriented organization, it’s not merely enough to attain a passable grade. You have to strive for service excellence to reap its benefits.

What is Service Excellence?

Service excellence is the act of going beyond customer expectations and delivering an industry-leading experience that really wows your clients. Most organizations provide good customer service, but customers keep coming back to the ones that go beyond to provide service excellence. It’s the reason Zappos and Amazon are leaders in their respective domains and are hailed for their commitment to serving their customers.

Why is Service Excellence Important?

Customer service is where your brand comes to life. While you can design a really informative great looking website and have all your internal processes running smoothly, it’s your frontline teams and their interaction with customers that make the biggest impression. So it’s important to remember how big a role customer service plays in defining that impression.

Another thing to keep in mind is that improving the sales of a product or service is not possible without continuously striving to redefine the standards of service excellence. 69% of customers stop doing business with a company due to one bad experience. People sign up for a product or service but stay for the customer experience.

Benefits of Achieving Service Excellence

Pursuing excellence in customer service has benefits beyond just customer satisfaction. Here are two benefits of centering your strategy around service excellence:

1. Service excellence can become a key differentiator you can leverage to get ahead of the competition. If you focus your efforts on being great at customer service you’ll convert customers into loyal advocates.

2. Great customer service can lead to viral word of mouth as satisfied customers share their experiences with your brand. It’s a great way to drum up both awareness and new business.

How do you Provide Service Excellence?

Here are the key ingredients of good service that can take your customer experience from good to great:

1. Convenience

Providing convenience starts with taking steps towards understanding customer preferences, for instance – what time do they prefer to speak to executives, or what type of communication channel they prefer to use. You should ensure that you are present on all modes of communication including chat, call, social media, etc. Also, make use of a customer support model that maximizes the availability of your agents so no matter when the customer contacts you there is an agent available to attend to them.

2. Speed

Don’t keep your customers waiting. Customers appreciate the quickness of response since patience is not really a virtue in the customer service industry. Once you respond to a customer query, the speed of resolution also matters. While some problems are harder to solve, the faster you can fix them the better. A lack of required personnel to manage the volume of calls, too many manual tasks that slow your agents down are possible bottlenecks you should eliminate to achieve the desired speed of service.

3. Do whatever it takes to make it right

To truly reach a standard of service excellence you have to give your customer service team the freedom to do whatever it takes for final resolution -whether that’s making compromises or spending a little extra.

One such example of this approach to customer service was demonstrated by Ritz Carlton. A customer mistakenly left his charger at their hotel while rushing to the airport. He planned to call them once he stepped into the office after landing, but when he got there, he found a package with not only his charger but an extra one just in case! That’s how committed they were to ensure the customer had a great experience even if it meant going out of their way to do so.

4. Be Proactive

It’s not enough to just react to problems anymore if you want to be a cut above the rest. Taking initiative and contacting a customer when a problem arises before they have a chance to reach out to you shows that you are prioritizing the issue at hand and you are acting with urgency and understanding. This type of vigilance is what separates a great service organization from the rest.

5. Analyze and Improve

Use data to back up the performance of your customer service team. It’s also the best available way to understand customer sentiment and whether or not your efforts are paying dividends. With so many reporting and analytics tools at your disposal, you can paint a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not. This way you can plug the gaps in your support and keep improving your customer experience.

Conclusion

The path to service excellence is might seem a little difficult at first, but by taking small steps you can make significant progress. It requires patience and persistence but most importantly a strong decision-making ability. Once you commit to service excellence you have to make sure you see it through. Building a reputation takes time and results will be gradual but it’s definitely worth the effort.

It’s no secret that the significance of an effective customer service strategy lies not only in delighting existing customers but in drawing in new business as well. Customers have become increasingly impatient and expect companies to respond to them faster. They are also likely to switch to other businesses or companies if your response time is too high.

There are many factors that might impact your average response time, including:

• the number of steps that agents have to take to find customer history and previous interactions
• the difficulty in communicating and collaborating with other teams
• absolute ticket volumes, as well as ticket volume to agent ratio
• the frequency of complex issues that routinely take longer to solve

To help you tackle these challenges in an efficient manner, we’ve put together this article where we deep dive into the average response times across channels, and also look at effective ways to improve customer responsiveness.

What is responsiveness in customer service?

Simply put, customer responsiveness indicates how fast and efficiently a company responds to customers. From a customer support standpoint, it is the time taken by the support agents to respond to your customers. It’s important to note that customer responsiveness covers first response time, and also the frequency and consistency in communication until the final resolution. Customers would be delighted if they get connected to an agent immediately but it would all fade off if they don’t receive a speedy solution to their queries.

Striking a balance between speed and quality is the biggest challenge faced by customer support agents. However, by clearly communicating the expected wait and query resolution time beforehand, you can help set the right expectations with customers. This will also enable customers to gain trust in your brand, and help you build customer loyalty. But the real question here is – how can you deliver timely and consistent customer support when you handle different communication channels?

The answer to this question lies in understanding the expected response times for each channel as well as knowing how to deliver better customer experience.

How crucial is the customer response time for each channel?

The average response time or average wait time differs for each support channel. Here is a breakdown of the average response time for each customer service channel.

Email

According to SuperOffice, the average wait time for an email is 12 hours and 10 minutes. Here is a representation of the percentage of different age groups expecting an email reply within 1 hour.

Phone and Live chat

People reach out to phone and live chat support to receive a fast and immediate response. Thus the average response time for the former is 3 seconds and the latter is under 1 minute.

Social Media

The average response time for social media differs across different platforms. Here is a graphical representation of the average response time of popular social media channels namely Facebook and Twitter.

How to improve customer responsiveness and create a better customer experience

1. Understand your customers

Identifying the channels your customers are more comfortable with is the first step in improving your customer responsiveness. Surveys and customer feedback forms can help you understand what customers expect in terms of wait times, and whether they were happy with the experience they had. This in turn can be fed back into your support strategy, and you can use the insights to make decisions such as hire more people, assign more resources on channels that customers expect faster service like chat. Knowing your customer better and engaging with them will help you outperform your competitors.

2. Leverage the power of technology

There are multiple ways that technology can help optimize and automate repetitive tasks in customer service, and thereby significantly improve your team’s responsiveness.

• Make use of a helpdesk software to streamline your support process. A good helpdesk software will help you prioritize the issues that need attention and bring all channels of communication onto one dashboard so agents don’t have to toggle between many tools. It offers historical context and 360 view of every customer by tracking customer journey across each channel and collaboration with other teams without losing context.
• Power your helpdesk or support software with automation to respond quickly to your customers. Automation will be hugely helpful to improve your customer responsiveness. Freshdesk Omni Route automatically assigns messages, chats, tickets, and phone calls to the right agent based on their agent loads. It also scans the customer inquiries and assigns it to the right team depending on the issue type and the channel they contacted you with. Furthermore, it will also update the progress of the issue to the customers.
• Deploying AI-driven chatbots to your support software is a boon to your business. They can handle customers and bring down your average first response time. With Freddy, the agents don’t have to spend time sorting the incoming tickets or answering the common queries that arise every day. It categorizes, prioritizes the incoming queries and also solves repetitive support processes with just a single click. The agents can bid adieu to these mundane tasks and focus on complex customer needs.

3. Provide consistent support experience

When providing support via different channels, the challenge lies in keeping it consistent without losing customer context across channels. An omnichannel support solution not only lets you manage multiple customer service channels from a single-window but will also help you provide a seamless and consistent support experience. The customers can reach out to you via any channels and receive a contextual response without having to worry about which channel is the best to reach out to you.

4. Provide resources for self-support

Implementing self-service options like a customer portal or a knowledge base is a perfect resource for the customers to solve their issues on their own, without having to wait to connect to an agent for every simple or common issue that arises. This will decrease the number of incoming queries to the customer support teams, and therefore reduce agent load and improve response times. This will free up agent time to address customers with bigger issues at hand.

5. Train your employees

A skilled workforce can perform better and build good customer relationships. Training your customer support staff on the importance of customer satisfaction and informing them about the expected response times for each channel will help them provide better support. Make sure your agents are aware of the common types of customer service questions or issues raised on your brand or business and are well-equipped to answer them. Also, ensure that your agents have access to your knowledge base so that all your employees can deliver a consistent support experience. This can be made easier with Freddy Answers, which automatically responds to the customers with the best answers from your knowledge base. It goes above and beyond by identifying intent and follows up the answer to bring conversational flow and engages with your customers.

6. Make use of canned responses and incorporate personalization

Canned responses or templates help you respond quickly to common customer issues with just a click. This saves you the time and effort of having to write the same messages or answers over and over again for different customers. With Freddy AI article and canned response suggestor, you can immediately send out a response without having to search through your list of canned responses or templates.

7. Set performance goals and monitor individual customer response time

Performance goals are essential for monitoring your customer support. Tracking metrics such as average response time, number of agent responses per ticket, and total time spent on a ticket will help you know where you stand and provide a better customer support experience. Set different benchmarks for each channel. As mentioned earlier, the average response time varies from channel to channel. So you will need to monitor the responsiveness of your support and query volumes separately for each channel. These goals motivate your agents to reach their goals and in turn, helps your business deliver a faster customer response.

Closing Thoughts

While rushing to offer faster responses to customers, try to stay as human as possible. What separates human agents from bots is the ability to understand and connect with your customers. Ensure that you listen to your customers and provide the right solution. Customer responsiveness is not only about fast responses but also the right responses and solutions. Improving your customer responsiveness indicates that you are on the fast and right track to win customers for life.

I was scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed on my cab ride to work this morning (yes, I know I could’ve caught up on some reading or a favourite podcast) when, in the middle of all the memes and all the quotes added to unrelated pictures, I found a shiny new piece of wisdom. A terribly tiny tale that said something along the lines of, “It wasn’t the fights that ruined it, it was the silence.”

And cheesy though that was, I thought, yeah. You get two people talking, and they’re bound to reach a point in conversation when they disagree. Interpersonal relationships and social interactions of any kind are bound to be strife with disagreements.

But do disagreements really need to mean conflict? Can disagreements not simply mean differences?

We see disagreements cross over into conflict everyday in support. My great uncle, for example, wasn’t happy at all about the way his mobile network provider’s customer care agent had spoken to him. “I contact support to get my questions answered, not to feel like an idiot for having them.” he said. The support agent who spoke to him, on the other hand, might believe that support means providing answers that are as clear as possible, even if that means using technical terms. In essence, this is a simple difference between the two parties. And yet, words were exchanged, frustrations rose, and people were left disgruntled.

What is that point at which difference crosses over into conflict? How can we stop it, and turn it around into compromise and cooperation?

I think the answer lies in what happens in the time it takes to get from difference to conflict; in communication. Uncle Bob simply wanted a solution to his problem, and wouldn’t mind a friendly voice on the other end. The agent simply wanted to resolve his customer’s issue and be better at his job. These two people had converging goals, but ended up not achieving either.

People will always have different notions of everything under the sun, but how can we take away the power of differences in interfering with our ends, especially in the world of business?

Make no assumptions

Assuming what the other party wants out of the interaction is the first mistake that sends the dominos cascading. If the support agent hadn’t assumed that the best thing for Uncle Bob was an information dump, their conversation might have gone better. If Uncle Bob hadn’t assumed that the support agent wanted to be condescending, he might have requested him to leave the technical jargon out of the conversation. Prior information about the customer can also lead to assumptions about them and what they expect for support – because everyone knows a customer who’s eighty years old would need things to be spelled out for him, right? The first step in ensuring good communication is cutting out the assumptions.

Aim to understand, not solve

With no assumptions being made about the customer or why they’re reaching out to you, you need to keep your eyes and ears open for cues. It’s not just about understanding and solving their problem, but doing it the way they want. Really listen and trust what your instincts tell you about how your customer wants to be served. If one tone doesn’t work, switch to another.

Be aware of what you can offer

When you’re on the right track to gauging customer expectations from your interactions, it’s important that you also remember how much you can actually offer your customer. How many of those expectations can you fulfill? How much hand-holding can you do today? Know your capacities and constraints in every customer interaction.

Find an expectations middle-ground

If what you’re getting from the interaction is that your customer wants to sit down and figure out how your software can help them in their 2018 plan, and you have 200 more tickets to go through before you can call it a day, you need to convey to them politely that you won’t be able to provide them exactly the service they’re looking for that day. Make the customer see that you understand what they want from you, that you want to provide them that experience, but that you have limitations that mean you may not be able to fully satisfy their expectations. Be sure to convey that you will find another way or another time to give them exactly the service that they sought.

By today’s norms, good customer service is just solving the problem. You solve every problem that comes your way and your customer base is solid. However, great customer service – the kind that wins hearts and lives on in memory – is all about communication.

If you want your business to succeed, it’s not enough to just bring in new customers over and over again. Yes, new customers are always needed, but if you’re not retaining the customers that you already have, you’ll always be working from a marked disadvantage.

That has always been true, but in 2020 it is more true than ever before.

A whopping 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers. So keeping your customers happy and coming back for more is absolutely vital to your continued success.

But customer retention isn’t easy. With competitors constantly trying to outdo you and steal your customers away, you’ve got to constantly be on top of your retention efforts, or you risk a mass exodus.

In this article, we’re going to arm you with a number of tips and tricks that will help you retain your customers for years to come, creating a steady stream of reliable revenue that will keep your company in the black.

Why is Customer Retention Important?

You know that retention is important, but how important is it really?

The world economy is in shambles as the world reels from the impact of COVID-19, which means that people aren’t going out and spending money. Consumers are not taking chances when they don’t know where their next paycheck is coming from.

As such, the already arduous task of generating new business has become even harder. But if you’ve managed to retain the customers that you already have, you’ll be working at less of a disadvantage. Customer retention allows you to future proof your business.

Another hurdle is that customer acquisition in today’s climate is incredibly expensive.

Customer acquisition costs for both the B2B and B2C sectors have gone up by almost 50% in the last five years.

So if your customer base is a revolving door, and you’re constantly having to replace old customers who have abandoned you, it’s going to be harder to generate a profit. At a time in which businesses are struggling with reduced revenue, those acquisition costs are going to be even more of a financial burden, pushing you ever deeper into the red.

When dealing with a brand new prospect, you have between a 5% and 20% chance of closing a sale. But, when you’re selling to someone that has already bought from you in the past, that chance goes up to 60% to 70%.

Now for the cherry on top. Customers are actually proven to spend more on brands that they are loyal to. According to Fundera, 43% of customers will open their wallets more for a company they feel a sense of loyalty for. Loyalty and security are two of the main driving factors which could lead to people spending money during uncertain economic times.

If they know that the company they’re doing business with produces quality work with value, they’re more likely to make a purchase than someone who sees your business as an unknown gamble.

So, to review:

• It is more cost-effective to retain customers
• It is easier to sell to existing customers
• Loyal repeat customers actually spend more money and are more likely to spend money during the economic downtime we’re currently experiencing

Now that you’re seeing dollar signs around customer retention, let’s focus on how to establish customer loyalty.

Understand Your Audience

If you’re going to successfully hold onto customers, you first have to understand them.

This includes:

• Who they are
• How old they are
• What they do
• What they like
• Where they live
• How they interact with the internet

You need to make sure that you’re up to date with all of the latest internet statistics so that you can ensure that you’re appealing to the sensibilities and preferences of your specific audience.

For example, 51.5% of global internet traffic in 2019 was via mobile devices. That’s up from 2009 where only 0.7% of internet traffic came from mobile. You can leverage that information into action. Clearly more people are using the internet via mobile platforms, so you should focus at least half of your retention efforts on mobile internet users that fall within your customer profiles.

For support professionals, it’s incredibly important to understand the needs of a target audience. Most notably, you have to be able to put yourself in their shoes and understand the pain points that they have. It’s also vital that you understand how the current economic climate is impacting these demographics.

If you’re marketing to urban communities in Florida, for instance, where COVID-19 cases are exploding, you’re going to have to take that into account when trying to retain your customers.

When you intimately know the sensibilities of your demographic, you’re able to better respond to their issues in a way that isn’t going to drive them off.

If you’re selling a tech-based product and you know that your audience is not made up of tech professionals, it’s never a good idea to come at them with technical jargon or assume that they know what they’re doing.

On the other side of the coin, if you are dealing with tech professionals, giving them a walkthrough on how to turn on their computer is going to frustrate them.

By developing a series of well thought out customer profiles, you’re going to be able to better serve your existing customers and ensure their continued loyalty well into the future.

Streamline the Sales and Support Processes

Interacting with your company and making repeat purchases needs to be simple. If it’s even a little bit difficult, your customers are going to start looking elsewhere.

Optimized landing pages and product pages make reordering a snap, but you’re also going to have to communicate consistently.

When a customer makes their initial purchase, the sales department should not be done with them. It’s important to reach out to existing customers to try and gauge their satisfaction and inquire about additional purchases or upselling.

Automation tools, such as CRM or customer support helpdesk, can be quite helpful in these situations. With these tools, you will be able to segment your customer base, schedule touch emails, and calls, and ask for feedback, so you don’t miss out on crucial post-purchase engagement.

These tools will also come in handy for your support staff. Customers will abandon you in droves if your support team isn’t stellar or if there is a significant drop in customer experience after purchase. When customers contact you with support related issues, they expect those problems to be solved quickly and efficiently.

With a helpdesk, you’re able to take notes on every interaction you have with a customer and provide better service by reviewing a customer’s entire interaction history before taking their call.

If this is a repeat issue, you can see what has and has not been done in the past and provide a more complete and satisfying support experience that will keep them coming back.

Create Content That Adds Value to Your Customers’ Lives

Content creation is vital when trying to retain customers. But it has to be content that adds value¹ to your customers’ lives.

It’s also important to remember that what was once valuable to a customer might not be anymore. In the midst of a global pandemic and economic crash, the priorities of your customers might have shifted. If so, then you’re going to have to adapt in order to continue meeting their needs.

When trying to attract new customers, you might take to guest blogging² to put your content out to the masses. But when you’re trying to retain customers, it makes more sense to include high-quality content in places where they can find it.

Obviously, you should be producing high-quality blog content that adds value to a customer’s overall experience with your company.

rom a support perspective, it’s important to have a strong knowledge base that your customers can peruse without ever having to call in for help. By providing this content at no cost, you’re giving a valuable service that will keep your customers satisfied and prevent them from wandering over to a competitor.

Your knowledge base should consist of both written and visual content. You might want to create a whole page of your knowledge base section to highlight how your company is adapting in the wake of current events as a way of ensuring your existing customers that the level of service they’ve come to expect from you will remain the same.

Engage Your Audience

You have to engage your audience in order to develop a sense of brand loyalty. Make sure that you’re replying to comments on social media, taking questions, and reaching out in order to ensure that the service you’re providing is the best that it can be.

As long as you have a passion for your topic and a deep knowledge base, you can establish customer trust through regular podcast episodes, as the above quote states.

When working with a podcast, you can take questions on social media and then answer them personally on the air. Not only does this show your audience that you’re hearing and responding to their concerns, but it’s also an amazing way to direct attention and downloads to your podcast.

Never underestimate how much people like to hear their names and words read aloud on a show they enjoy.

Also, while people are stuck inside and social distancing, they’re more hungry than ever for content. Producing something like a podcast or web video series can generate more attention now than it might have eight months ago when your audience had a lot more to focus on.

If you’re not engaging your customers enough, more than half of them will consider dropping your services.

The old adage of “It’s not personal, it’s just business” doesn’t really hold true outside of The Godfather. People are influenced by their emotions when it comes to the companies that they do business with.

When you actively engage with your audience, it builds emotional bonds that keep them coming back well into the future.

Offer Giveaways, Discounts, and Loyalty Programs

It’s always a great idea to reward customer loyalty.

After all, you’re obviously grateful for your repeat customers. It’s time that you let them know in a way that positively impacts their customer experience.

Make sure that you organize special giveaways for some of your top or most profitable customers. Really put your all into these giveaways so that they seem special. Design a special limited graphic for it, promote it along social channels, you could even write about it in your blog or talk about it on your podcast.

It’s also a great idea to offer discounts regularly to some of your more frequent fliers. These can be communicated directly through email campaigns.

Medical Alert Buyer’s Guide crafted a short article that helps seniors in the AARP find the right medical alert system for their specific needs and budget. This helpful step establishes trust by imparting important information while simultaneously pushing products to new and repeat customers alike.

Send out special coupons. Let them know that this offer is just for them in gratitude for the loyalty they’ve shown as a valued customer. With the economy breaking into pieces, your audience could see special discounts and rewards for their loyalty as even more of a service. This would, in turn, inspire even more loyalty from them going forward.

Consider a loyalty program with some form of gamification built-in. People love competing and winning prizes. Gamification is also a growing trend in business, with more than 56% of loyalty programs implementing some game mechanics.

Sources have also stated that up to 70% of customers will recommend your company to a friend or colleague if they are happy with your loyalty program.

That’s because loyalty programs make customers feel special, and that in turn makes them more loyal than ever.

In Conclusion

Loyal customers who come back for more are the bread and butter of any modern business. And when the economic state of the world is in constant flux, it’s important to make good use of that existing customer pool.

As such, you have to do a lot of work to increase your customer retention rates and keep those people coming back.

Implement these vital customer retention steps, and you can take comfort in a strong customer base that is supplemented by new incoming buyers who have the potential to become loyal repeat customers themselves.

Well done, you – you’ve got great customer feedback coming in.

Your team is happy, your bosses are too.

But isn’t there more you could be doing with this positive customer feedback?

Those nuggets of information from your customers are not, and should not be purely for internal reflection.

The real power of positive customer feedback becomes evident when you market and promote the feedback.

Customers are happy to oblige, with one study1 finding that 68% of customers are willing to provide a case study when asked.

Ultimately, it’s about making your best customers your best examples.

Here are some of the top ways to promote your customer success stories, not just for brand building, but also for driving sales. Let’s go!

Share Positive Feedback on Social Media

With a plethora of social media channels around, spreading the word is only a click or two away.

Social media profiles have become the bridge between businesses and customers. Your social media profiles should be more than a place to post cool company retreat pictures.

According to a Dell research, 75% of customers’ purchasing choices are influenced by posts on social media.

With a bit of copying-and-pasting, you can take the text from your positive review and make it into a happy Facebook post.

Or if you fancy flexing your creative muscles, you could take a quote from the review, add an inspiring image and share it onInstagram. A quick @ mention on Twitter wouldn’t hurt, either.

Online reviews and social proof are the new word-of-mouth feedback. Make sure that you don’t lose out.

Social community building isn’t restricted to just B2C. Sure, B2B customers typically buy bigger ticket items and have more administrative purchasing decisions, but they still check reviews, case studies, and social feeds.

According to an article by the Harvard Business Review, reading user-generated reviews about a product can encourage 94 percent of these buyers to make a purchase.

Create and Share Compelling Case Studies

What makes a perfect case study?

A story.

Sounds simple, but writing a compelling story is harder than it seems.

But once you find the angle, or the thread to tie things together, writing an effective case study becomes easier.

People connect with case studies because it is a customer telling a story about your brand, rather than an obviously self-centered sales pitch.

Another bonus of case studies is the fact that they hone in on one or a few particular benefits your business offers. By their nature, case studies should not be too generic – they should focus on the story of one customer, and how your business solves their specific problems.

A focus on case studies doesn’t only attract new customers, it helps retain existing ones. It further validates the reasons your customer joined you in the first place.

No wonder that 73% of B2B marketers are regularly creating case studies. In fact, these marketers list case studies as their second most-effective marketing method, just behind white papers.

Display Customer Feedback on Your Website

Nothing gives more assurance that you’re worth spending money on than strategic placement of great customer feedback on your site.

The reason? Well, the average global e-commerce conversion rate is 2.86%. Of course, variations in product and brand affect this rate, but it still means there are a lot of customers out there who are not moving through your sales funnel.

Today, 93% of consumers are directly influenced by online reviews. Almost everyone is looking for reassurance when investigating your product or service.

With such a lookout for feedback – and such a need to move prospects through the sales funnel – proudly showing your latest feedback, or overall reputation, is key to a persuasive website.

Want people to know your customer service is up to scratch? Place your CSAT widget on your homepage.

Got particular products to promote? Display positive reviews about the product on the main product page, or on the checkout section for that extra bit of encouragement.

Shout About Your Reputation – Even Offline

Snippets of great customer feedback, five-star reviews, or great CSAT ratings, should not be restricted to online use.

There’s a world out there that’s offline, and these nuggets of great customer feedback are valuable there too.

The fact is 80% of people trust reviews as much as personal recommendations, so it pays to show off your reputation whenever you can to remain on the mind of your customers.

If you are running a print advertising campaign, include a customer quote in the ad to add that customer-centric perspective. If you are sending packages, be sure to stick a quote or a snippet showcasing your great reputation on the packaging itself.

The opportunities for you to show how good you are, through the voice of your customers is practically endless.

Ask for Reviews on Marketplaces

If you are providing a good service, some reviews will come organically. But do not assume this for all reviews – instead be proactive and approach your customers for feedback.

And don’t forget: when you get a review, reward and thank the person behind the review. A little kindness goes a long way.

Get out there and Share the Love!

These are just some ideas you can deploy right now to turn great customer feedback into your number one marketing asset.

And the best benefit of all this? Your new customer-centric approach will gradually become the centerpiece of your values and identity, prompting a more trustworthy, transparent culture with your customers who will be more than willing to share their feedback.