Why Providing an Exceptional Customer Experience Should Be Your #1 New Year’s Resolution

You are not very far from that time of the year when everyone around you will start taking resolution. For you, this resolution could be finding effective ways to provide your customers with exceptional customer service. Customer experience has become a strong competitive differentiator over years. This is the perfect opportunity for you to review your performance in order to bring in suitable changes that can help your business to grow. Here is why it is absolutely necessary for you to make a resolution to provide an exceptional customer experience.

Opportunity to Assess: This is indeed an opportunity for you to evaluate the existing customer service solution. A complete assessment of the existing customer support tools and techniques means that you are on your way to understand and address the problems. Businesses usually take this opportunity to understand the efficiency of the tools they are using. Whether the problem is with tools or determining the escalation path, this informal audit helps you to have a comprehensive understanding of the prevailing gaps that stand as impediment in your way to achieve success.

Find the Right Tools: As you understand the existing gaps, you need to take prompt action regarding fixing those. Whether your business is suffering from not having omni-channel presence or lack of live chat, you should address it in order to provide seamless support to your customers. Tracking the engagement of your customers and diagnosing the problems are the key to success in this case. The best thing to do is to integrate all the insights that you get from all your channels. Setting up the required tools may take some time but this is the most significant step towards building a successful customer experience.

Training: As you incorporate new tools, you must make sure that your agents are aware of these tools and are comfortable with them. Under such circumstances, you can come up with a rigorous training program aimed at helping your executives to resolve problems quickly in compliance with these new tools. Once your agents possess required knowledge about your products and services, they are more likely to take less time to solve customer issues. Ability to resolve problems and eliminating chances of poor experience are the basic foundation of matchless customer service experience.

Gamut of Choices: Nothing can be worse than seeing a customer leaving you because you don’t have the range of products that they expect or are interested in. Perhaps by now you know that satisfied customers are all you need to have a growing business. So the products offered by you should be the ones that customers need and are interested in. You should be able to provide your customers with choices not only in terms of products but also in terms of checkout options. While millennials may prefer self-service, your older customers are likely to need human assistance.

Be Heedful to Data: Paying necessary heed to the data will actually pay you back. Every transaction gives you information about the customer. Using the data available, you need to understand the ways in which your customers can be satisfied. Incorporating insights based on the data at hand can be a way to show that you care for your customers. A free ticketing system can be helpful. Based on your customer choices and preferences, you can also offer a range of products while they check out.

Customer Service - Not a Cost Center: Offering the best customer service with the help of tools and customer support agents has its own cost. But you need to stop thinking customer support as a cost center. Rather you should think of customer support operation as a tool that helps you to build a long term relationship with your customers. Having more satisfied customers requires you to invest in retaining in existing customers.

Measure Customer Satisfaction: If you are not already measuring the level of customer satisfaction, it is high time you do. Nothing can be better than the new year to start using metric in order to evaluate the level of customer satisfaction. You can use either CSAT or NPS. Many businesses use both. CSAT or Customer Satisfaction Score gives you an idea about the satisfaction level of the customer in connection a specific product or service. On the other hand, the NPS or Net Promoter Score paves the path for you to know more about the long term satisfaction level of the customer. Another popular tool used by popular businesses is Customer Effort Score or CES. It is known for measuring the amount of effort put by a customer during an interaction. It requires less effort on the part of the customer to have a high CES score.

Create an Impact in the Community: Despite being viewed as a marketing initiative by many businesses, community activities are the key to have ongoing conversations about you and your business. This is also an excellent opportunity for you to have your customers involved. Hosting informational events can be a great start. In addition, you can also donate to a noble cause that contributes to the betterment of the community. Such initiatives help you to be in the mind of your consumers.

Vaishali Gopi is an enthusiastic Digital Marketer who has keen interest towards customer support management and related stuff and voices about it frequently.