How to Create Unforgettable Customer Service Moments
Table of contents
In today’s world, consumers demand a flawless customer experience. The bar has gone up, and being average is no longer acceptable. Otherwise, your business could be crushed by the Amazon effect.*
Today, customer service is about more than just answering your customer’s questions politely and in a timely fashion. That might have worked once upon a time, but it doesn’t cut it today.
Brands are looking for newer and unique ways everyday to deliver the best customer experience possible.
Table of Contents
- What is a Great Customer Experience?
- Why Is Delivering the Best Customer Experience Important Today?
- What Makes for a Memorable Customer Service Experience?
- 10 Ways to Deliver the Best Customer Experience Consistently
- 1. Understand Your Customers
- 2. Embed Customer Service Excellence Into Your Company Culture
- 3. Train Your Support Agents
- 4. Empower Your Support Agents
- 5. Reward Stellar Customer Service
- 6. Invest in Building an Immaculate Online Presence
- 7. Personalize Website Interactions
- 8. Aim to Delight Your Customers, Not Just Satisfy Them
- 9. Provide Omni-Channel Customer Support
- 10. Empower Customers With a Stellar Knowledge Base
- Bottom Line
What is a Great Customer Experience?
A great customer experience can be defined as a series of interactions between a brand and its customers where the latter feel valued, understood, and satisfied by the service provided by the business.
What makes the experience memorable are the following elements:
- Seamless Interactions: Whether online, offline, or transitioning between the two, interactions should be effortless and intuitive for the customer.
- Personalized Engagements: Businesses should proactively recognize a customer’s individual preferences, behaviors, and needs, and tailor the experience accordingly.
- Provide Consistent Value: Brands should ensure that every interaction, whether it’s with a product, service, or support, should consistently meet or exceed the customer’s expectations.
- Empathetic Conversations: Genuine human connection is at the core of a memorable customer service experience. When service representatives actively listen and understand a customer’s feelings or frustrations, they foster a sense of trust. Empathy shows customers they are not just a transaction but are valued individuals.
- Accessibility and Convenience: Customers should be able to easily access products, services, support, and information or resources whenever they prefer.
- Timely Responses: In the age of immediacy, consumers expect quick responses. Delays can escalate frustrations. A swift response not only addresses the issue at hand but also conveys to the consumer that their concerns are a priority.
When you aim to provide the best customer experience, these elements should come together. They help in forming a cohesive and a positive customer experience that builds trust and fosters loyalty. It encourages customers to not only continue their relationship with the brand but also advocate for it to others.
Why Is Delivering the Best Customer Experience Important Today?
Out of all the customer service statistics that prove why putting customers first is important, this one by Hiver stands out – 72% of consumers switch brands after a bad customer service experience. A similar study was found by Microsoft as well. So a great customer experience leads to customer retention.
Clearly, the impact of poor customer service can hurt any business tremendously. But these moments are only one component of a successful customer experience.
While support interactions are just a moment in time, the customer experience encompasses the entire journey. This can have a great impact on how your customer feels about your company. And that’s a very good thing:
“Crafting a well-executed customer experience strategy will not only help your business retain customers, it will also help to endear new buyers and skyrocket your revenue over time.” (Forbes).
What Makes for a Memorable Customer Service Experience?
So if everybody is doing it, how can your company rise above the rest? These are three key ways to go above and beyond to provide an unforgettable customer service experience, such as:
- Personal: Start with a human touch. Personalized interactions let customers know that your company cares about them and their specific pain points. For example, having a live agent resolve a complex issue instead of a chatbot.
- Unexpected: To stand out, you need to do things that not everybody is doing. Take an extra step to make your customers feel valued.
- Timely: The right interaction at the right time makes a huge difference.
8 Examples of Bad Customer Service and How to Avoid Them
10 Ways to Deliver the Best Customer Experience Consistently
In order to create memorable customer service moments, you need to build the infrastructure into your company that makes stand-out interactions possible.
1. Understand Your Customers
Looking to wow your customers? You need to listen. Understanding your customer data is vital, and it starts with having intimate knowledge of the customer journey.
Focus on customer satisfaction levels to get a sense of how happy your customers are with your brand, services, and products. To do so, you can incorporate metrics like CSAT while collecting feecback from your customers
Feedback is a clear and valuable indicator of customer satisfaction, so pay attention to it!
Collecting customer feedback can also help improve your services and products and offer you data to make the right business decisions. Feedback can come in many forms:
- Reviews
- Comments
- Social Media
- Surveys
- Polls
Ensure you don’t just wait for customers to leave feedback – be proactive and ask them for it whenever you get an opportunity.
Recommended read: Measure customer feedback in real-time
2. Embed Customer Service Excellence Into Your Company Culture
Online retailer Zappos is famous for its wow moments, and that’s no accident. It’s part of who they are as a Online retailer Zappos is famous for its wow moments, and that’s no accident. It’s part of who they are as a company. And that focus is reflected everywhere. Access customer service is available right on the homepage, eliminating the need for customers to go hunting for help.
Nextiva is another example of a humanized B2B brand that emphasizes its commitment to customer service and reliability across the entire website experience. On one of their webpages, they flex an endorsement from Shark Tank’s Mr. Wonderful, regarding their amazing service and reliability. Again, highlighting reviews and comments is a great way to put your customers first.
Nextiva also has a page dedicated to explaining its ‘Amazing Service’, which is trademarked as part of the brand’s promise. If your brand considers itself customer-centric, it could help to create a webpage dedicated to your customer service promise. This is another way to build customer confidence.
3. Train Your Support Agents
You need to teach your customer service team members how to cater to your customers’ needs from day one. On a basic level, your reps need deep knowledge of your products, services, as well as your customers.
Most turnover in businesses is due to poor training and onboarding. Your company should have a robust employee training curriculum to ramp- up new hires fast and effectively.
Recommended read: 10 Brilliant Customer Service Training Games
4. Empower Your Support Agents
Once your customer service representatives know how to create memorable customer service moments, you need to give them the power to make decisions that will delight customers on the spot.
For example, according to Zappo’s website, “all representatives have the authority to accept special-case returns, offer partial or full refunds in cases of loss of service, pay for damages, and provide solutions in any other manner they deem appropriate.” Putting this expectation out there for your customers is just one way to empower your support team. This in turn improves customer relationships.
5. Reward Stellar Customer Service
Another way to motivate your employees to provide the best customer service experience is through incentivization. Whether that’s through pay raises and bonuses, team outings, or if it’s a huge achievement, send them on vacation! If they’re already on a business trip in Europe for example, a little excursion to the Louvre or a historic trip with the Band of Brothers Tour will surely be remembered and appreciated.
Make sure to recognize employees who go above and beyond. This encourages others to do the same. Consider utilizing employee performance management software to track common customer service metrics like Average Handle Time, First Contact Resolution, Length of Support Queue, and more. The more data you have on your customer service reps, the more accurately you’ll be able to craft incentives.
6. Invest in Building an Immaculate Online Presence
Memorable customer experience starts at the first impression. For most businesses, that first impression is your online presence where the impact of online reviews is significant.
Aside from a highly optimized website experience, reputation management plays a critical role in today’s B2B buying process. In fact, Miller Heiman Group cited that at least 50% of B2B buyers have already made up their minds before talking to a B2B sales rep.
One way to boost your online reviews is to encourage customers to leave a review after they’ve had a positive experience. When it comes to negative reviews, you can use this as an opportunity to respond to dissatisfied customers and instill confidence that their next experience will be better.
Recommended Read: The Complete Guide to Online Customer Service
7. Personalize Website Interactions
No one wants to feel insignificant. And that’s why personalization is non-negotiable while delivering an unforgettable customer experience. For example, using a customer’s name is Personalization 101. Greeting people by their names or using their names in conversations assures them that they aren’t just a faceless number to you.
However, in this day and age, personalization goes beyond the first name. This can be as simple as remembering their coffee drink without them having to spell it out each time. Or it can be as complicated as recording their information in your CRM to use in follow-up conversations.
For instance, with Hiver, teams can personalize their conversations with customers using the Hiver Contacts feature. It provides you with all the necessary context before responding to a customer.
The point is, you must anticipate their needs and then exceed customer expectations.
8. Aim to Delight Your Customers, Not Just Satisfy Them
You need to delight customers by going that extra mile. Do something special, that makes them happy which ultimately leads to an amazing customer experience. And happy customers attract new customers.
For instance, hand-written notes are often more memorable than the fanciest email sequence.
For example, online pet retailer Chewy sends hand-signed birthday cards to every customers’ pet on their birthday. “This simple gesture really stands out,” says Chris Allen, Founder of family dog website OodleLife. “What they’ve done is to tap into the emotional connection people have with their pets, making their customers feel valued and appreciated.”
Give loyal customers an added advantage or special treatment. It could be something small like a free coffee after every ten purchases. Converting loyal customers into happy customers can be a game changer for businesses.
Or it could be something big. Amazon Prime members not only get free shipping, but they also get access to all kinds of benefits like extra discounts and early access. Both of these center the customer’s delight around your product or service.
Recommended read: What Is Customer Happiness? 10 Practical Ways to Keep Customers Happy
9. Provide Omni-Channel Customer Support
Technology exists to provide world-class service to customers, no matter how they decide to contact your business. Communication channels like commercial phone service, live chat, SMS, email, support tickets, and social media are essential today.
Omni-channel customer support is an approach that aims to provide a seamless and integrated experience for customers across multiple touchpoints. With the help of omnichannel customer interaction, brands can avoid having the customer repeat themselves or explain the same situation to multiple support agents.
If you are going for an omnichannel interaction, then treat every channel as an opportunity for customer engagement.
10. Empower Customers With a Stellar Knowledge Base
Creating a knowledge base is an integral part of your CX strategy. Sometimes, customer satisfaction means not having to contact the support team at all. Empower your customers to thrive without you by providing self-service resources they can access on their own. These resources could include customer education materials such as knowledge base articles, how-to videos, webinars, and other enablement collateral.
Make sure your resources are relevant, easy to find, and timely. Invest in tech that puts the right resources into your customer’s hands at the right time. A robust knowledge base is a sign of excellent customer service.
Recommended read: How to Create a Knowledge Base
Bottom Line
Research show that 80% of consumers expect better customer service since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. And so, in order to stand out, brands need to raise their bar.
Memorable customer service moments can really enhance your customer journey, improve customer loyalty and drive profits. Ask yourself: Are you providing enough of these moments to your customers? Are there areas of the customer experience that you need to improve?
Investing in the right customer service tools also play a huge role. For instance, a help desk can give you the central visibility of all your customer query tickets. This central visibility can also help you deliver an amazing omni-channel support. Your frontline support reps can have contextual discussions with your customers which can help in faster query resolution.
If you are looking out for solutions like these, you might want to check out Hiver. Apart from all the features mentioned above, you can also resolve your customer queries straight from your Gmail inbox with Hiver.
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