How To Improve Customer Service

Improving customer service is an effective way to not only delight existing customers but also to attract new customers. While some businesses deliver a great customer experience, many have areas for improvement. Driving even small improvements in these areas can make all the difference between having satisfied customers that will value your business and dissatisfied customers who may turn to your competitors for products/services. All businesses want to improve their customer service, but with so many different aspects of customer service to focus on, few know where to get started.

Finding out how to improve customer service is the first part of your improvement journey; after this the challenge of implementation looms. To help with this, we discuss the key benefits of improving customer service and outline the most effective ways to improve customer service.

Key Benefits Of Improving Customer Service

Improving customer service has the potential to transform your customer experience and engender loyalty from your existing customers. When the improvements are particularly effective, it can even help to attract new customers into your business. Reviewing the key benefits of improving customer service is very much worthwhile as it underlines the importance of making improvements while also alluding to what the potential impact of the improvements may be.

While the benefits are almost endless, there are a few standout benefits that can make a real difference to the success of most businesses. We explore the key benefits below.

1) Increase Customer Retention

As the cost of acquiring new customers for businesses increases, the importance of retaining existing customers has never been greater. Exceptional customer service creates delight amongst your customer base while also creating the opportunity to build stronger long-term relationships with customers. Happy customers that have built a strong relationship with your business are far less likely to look elsewhere for products/services if you are already delivering for them. Great customer service can be a very powerful reason for a customer to continue a relationship with your business. Winning their loyalty in this way also presents a range of sales opportunities that your business can capitalise on to power its future growth.

In many ways the positive impact that customer service can have on customer retention is enough of a reason in itself to improve customer service. Businesses that are passionate about delivering great customer service will enjoy strong customer retention too.

2) Gain A Competitive Advantage

Getting ahead of your competitors can be a challenge, especially if your business operates within a competitive sector. When you are delivering exceptional customer service, you gain an advantage that is difficult for your competitors to imitate. Unlike reducing your prices or investing in a new technology for your business, delivering great customer service requires so much more than just a single action. It involves multiple elements, many of which are far from easy to match including people, processes, and systems. Your competitors will have quite a challenge to match your exceptional customer service.

Customers are also likely to recognise this competitive advantage and in many cases are happy to pay a premium for standout service that goes above and beyond the norm in your sector. This creates an opportunity to increase revenue and also profitability.

3) Enhance Your Business Reputation

As we all know, in business reputation is everything. In order to succeed, your business needs to build a reputation for excellence in everything that you do. Creating great products or delivering superb services is not enough to build a positive reputation if it is not backed up by great customer service. If your business has great customer service to complement its products/services, it will be able to deliver positive customer experiences, which in turn build a positive reputation not just with those customers but also with the people that they interact with.

Happy customers are much more likely to recommend your business to others, which can build your customer base and improve brand recognition among those who are yet to use your business.

4) Creates Cost Saving Opportunities

Making cost savings is a focus for many businesses, particularly during challenging economic conditions or when your business is seeking to improve its profitability. Although delivering exceptional customer service has a cost, it is often a far lower cost than that of resolving high volumes of complaints. Complaints can be costly to address, especially if your business is required to replace or refund products/services to satisfy customers.

Improving your customer service so you are delivering exceptional customer service everyday helps to reduce the volume of complaints and the costs associated with resolving them. This can often prevent issues from arising in the first place and lead to efficiency savings, which can quickly add up particularly for businesses that handle significant volumes of customer service issues.

5) Provides Valuable Customer Insights

When customer service is delivered effectively, your customer service team will develop strong relationships with customers based on respect and trust. Customers that feel respected and are able to trust your customer service team will be more inclined to share their preferences, issues, and even suggestions as to how your products/services could be improved.

Gaining such powerful insights directly from your customers is a powerful way to drive service improvement and inform changes that you could make to your products/services. Acquiring these insights through customer focus groups or dedicated research can be expensive and time consuming so for it to result from great customer service is a significant bonus.

How To Improve Customer Service

Improving customer service can have such a positive impact on your business, the impact that just a few of the key benefits above can be very significant. The challenge that many businesses face is how to improve customer service in an effective way. There are many different ways to improve customer service and all in some way rely on having a skilled customer service team in place to deliver them. We explore some of the most effective approaches that are employed to improve customer service.

Develop The Right Attitude

Exceptional customer service requires a skilled and experienced customer service team that all share the right attitude for delivering great service. When all members of a customer service team have the same vision for service excellence, driving improvements forward becomes far easier and customer service initiatives are naturally more effective.

Every customer service specialist should demonstrate the values of the business that they represent in their attitude and how they behave toward customers. When they are deployed correctly, values can be a strong driver of great service especially when everyone is aiming for the same vision. A customer service team that is united behind the same vision is undoubtedly a powerful force and can deliver successful outcomes that may have been seen as unimaginable.

At Impact, we are proud to have an experienced team of customer service specialists that have a positive can-do attitude. When it comes to supporting our client’s customers, every one of our specialists are united behind the very same vision – delivering exceptional customer service every day. It is why some of the UK’s leading brands trust us as their chosen customer service outsourcing partner.

Make It Easy For Customers To Do Business With You

While this may seem like a simple way to improve customer service, it is surprising that so many businesses do not make it easy for customers to do business with them. Creating barriers to communication or interaction is always counterintuitive as it almost always results in customer frustration and customers looking elsewhere for the products/services that they require. It is an easy way to deliver great service that far too many businesses overlook.

In practical terms, making it easy for customers to interact with customer services can involve supporting a variety of different channels including phone, email, and chat to name but a few. It is important to be where your customers are, so the specific channels that you support may vary depending on your business and its customer base. Being present on the right channels is a good strategy but this can be enhanced further by providing timely responses to issues and being there for customers when they need you the most.

Employ The Right People

Great people are very much at the heart of every successful customer service team, whether it is in-house or part of an outsourced customer service company like Impact. When you employ the right people as part of your customer service team, customer service operations are able to run much more smoothly and be more effective. Customer specialists need to have the right attitude and a sufficient skillset to deliver an exceptional level of service to customers. Although finding the right people to take care of customer service is rarely easy, the positive impact that having the right people will bring makes it very much worthwhile.

Finding the right customer service specialists is a challenge that many businesses face, particularly during a challenging labour market. It is a key driver for why businesses choose to outsource customer service to experienced partner with all the required expertise and experience of hiring great customer service people. At Impact, we take the time to employ the right people in our business, so we are best placed to deliver great service to our clients and their customers. It is what sets us apart from many other outsourced call centres, who may not have customer service specialists with the skillset and training that ours do.

Help Your Customer Service Team Be Happy

Happy customer service teams are far more effective than those that are dissatisfied and unable to enjoy their work. Working within customer service can be challenging, so it is essential that extra effort is made to help your team be happy at work. If you have happy employees that are engaged with their work, they are best placed to support customers and resolve the issues that they are facing. The productivity gains and reduction in absenteeism that can be achieved by having a happy customer service team is so significant, it really can make all the difference to the quality of customer service delivery.

Helping your team to be happy often involves many different strategies from the more straightforward such as making each specialist feel valued and listened to through to the more involved such as launching an employee assistance programme (EAP) and providing perks such as retail discounts that reward valued team members for their great work.

Most importantly, it is critical that your customer service team feels listened to and able to raise issues or suggest ideas in a non-judgemental and open environment. Customer service specialists that identify a clunky or frustrating process that causes issues for customers should feel able to put their suggestion forward. When their suggestion is implemented and this improves the customer experience, it brings happiness to the specialist as they have made a difference. This alone has a significant influence on their happiness and can sometimes be more powerful than the more traditional perks.

The culture of care that we have for our teams at Impact aims to support the happiness of every team member. We take the time to support and listen to every one of our valued employees because it is the right thing to do and is critical to the success of everyone involved in our business. At Impact, we want our teams to be involved in our vision, so we share our goals and build a mission that everyone can unite behind. As our teams feel involved and very much part of achieving our goals, we can all celebrate success and make a difference to the clients that we support.

Empower Your Employees

Customer service employees that are empowered will be best placed to help the customers that they serve. Empowerment should not be full autonomy. However, empowering employees to take decisions within set parameters or frameworks can save time, money, and lead to a superior customer service experience.

Specialists are often able to find suitable solutions to customer issues and make the right judgements when they are suitably trained and empowered. For example, customer specialists that are empowered to grant customer refunds up to a set amount without escalation can optimise use of team resources while also providing a faster resolution to the end customer.

Personalise Customer Service

Personalised interactions are so much better than non-personalised ones. When a customer service interaction is personalised, each customer feels so much more valued and listened. A customer is elevated from feeling like a number to a truly valued customer of your business. Taking the time to get to know your customers makes personalisation even more powerful as you can personalise interactions in an authentic way.

In practical terms, personalisation can be as straightforward as knowing a customer’s name and a bit about them through to knowing their product/service preferences including likes and dislikes. As long as the personalisation is authentic, it has the potential to improve customer service.

Increase Customer Satisfaction Through Efficiency

All customers enjoy customer service interactions that are focused on efficiency. After all, who would want to endure a needlessly complex or frustrating process when a simple one will do? Efficiency can be achieved by making the contact process for reaching a customer service adviser straightforward and hassle-free or by streamlining the process for resolving a customer issue.

Efficient customer contact and issue resolution processes result in higher customer satisfaction and a more positive customer experience. Such improvements do not only benefit customers; they also drive resource savings that have positive financial implications on metrics such as revenue and profit.

Aim For First Time Resolution

Wherever possible, customers want a first-time resolution when they reach out to customer service with their issue. Delivering a first-time resolution will delight your customers and often result in valuable savings made as a result of avoiding unnecessary escalations or handovers to other customer service specialists.

While a first-time resolution is not always possible due to the complex nature of some issues that customer services encounter, it should always be the goal. The significant impact that it has on customer satisfaction is very much worth the effort.

Be Proactive And Deliver On Your Promises

Everyone can remember a poor customer experience where a customer service advisor has been less than proactive and has not made a promised call back. The fact that these experiences are memorable and stick around makes being proactive and true to your promises even more important. When a customer service advisor has been proactive and delivered on a promise that they have made, it does truly delight a customer. There is rarely a better way to create a better lasting impression about a business than that.

At Impact, we are passionate about how proactive our outsourced customer service specialists are and the great results that this delivers for clients. Delivering on our promises is what we strive to do every day as we delight our client’s customers with world-class service.

Make Key Information Easily Accessible

Every customer interaction is different and may require different information to deliver an appropriate resolution. Placing key information within easy reach of your customer service advisors will help them to deliver the best possible service to the customer in a timely and efficient manner. This can reduce instances where customers are put on hold unnecessarily, shorten interaction durations and increase the likelihood of first-time resolution.

We take the time to make information easily accessible to our customer service advisors so they can be at their best for our clients’ customers. Whether it requires refining systems, adopting software, or reformatting information, we will stop at nothing in pursuit of world-class customer service.