Customers are more demanding than ever and service expectations are on the increase. With the ability to communicate through a huge range of different channels customers expect their requests to be addressed quickly and efficiently and they want fast responses to any queries or complaints.
But how do you get the basics right and ensure that your organisation delivers service excellence and potential customer service issues are mitigated against and minimised in the first place.
Delivering and managing customer service excellence is not easy and takes a lot of commitment and dedication at all levels of an organisation. Here are a few top tips from the customer experience experts at Mapovate to provide some assistance.
Make service excellence part of the company culture
It’s easier said than done but every member of the team, whether they are customer facing or not, should know the importance of world class customer service and be trained in providing service excellence. And great service shouldn’t just be for customers it should be something every organisation should strive for internally, treating all colleagues as customers too.
Understand your customers
Customer journey mapping can be an incredibly effective way of putting yourself in your customer’s shoes, identifying key customer service touchpoints and understanding where potential problems can occur. An exercise of this type can be extremely complex depending on the size and type of your organisation, but by using a tool such as Mapovate.com can really help to simplify things.
Become expert communicators
Whatever the type of business you need to make it easy for customers to get in touch, using their preferred channel. Make your contact information easy to find online and make it easy for customers to communicate with you. Where possible provide a telephone number and email address, have a form on your website so customers can get in touch quickly and easily and utilise social media as another way for customers to have a dialogue with you. Live chat is another great tool which will allow customers to ask questions, raise issues and ask for contact information instantly.
Make social media work for you
A lot of companies still shy away from using social media as a tool to communicate with customers as they are afraid of complaints damaging their reputation. However social media should be embraced as a way to communicate with customers. Not only does it show a human side to your organisation and give you credibility, but it also can help you respond quickly, even if you can’t actually answer the query there and then or deal with the complaint. At least the customer knows they’ve been heard and it shows the rest of the world that you’re responsive and are willing and able to deal with any issues as they arise.
Get Personal
Everyone wants to feel special so think about where or how you can personalise your customer experiences to take them to the next level. In reality there aren’t many organisations that can actually get to know their customers personally, but you can use the data you collect about them to build customer profiles and create a more tailored experience. Maybe start with your most frequent or loyal customers and offer them a unique offer to say thanks for their custom?
Encourage feedback
Specialist customer feedback tools such as KnowledgeTRAK can provide a fast and effective way to extract real time data on an ongoing basis. Conducting regular customer surveys, proactively asking for feedback and suggestions and running mystery shopper programmes can provide invaluable data about the customer experience and customer attitudes to your organisation.
Combining two powerful online tools like KnowledgeTRAK and Mapovate can not only help you understand your customers and gain insights but will allow you to see exactly where you need to improve and provide the reports to back up your findings and collaborate quickly and seamlessly with colleagues.
To see how Mapovate.com can help your organisation get in touch or sign up for our 14 day free trial today!