Table of Contents
It’s a given that keeping your customers happy will ensure longevity and long-term success. Your customers are the lifeblood of your business, and customer satisfaction needs to be a top priority if you want your business to thrive and grow. Customers are more aware and demanding than ever, and if you fail to provide exceptional service, they will take their business elsewhere. Granted, building a functioning, long-term relationship is hard work, but that should not detract from the importance of striving for superior customer service.
A solid customer service strategy will not only help strengthen relationships with your customers but also boost retention rates. If your customers sense you're not providing them with the level of service they expect, they will stop using your products and services altogether.
It's thus vital to measure the customer satisfaction levels of your company by asking consumers how happy they are with their service and experience. By understanding these crucial insights, business owners can make improvements in the ways their company operates so that they can meet, perhaps even exceed these levels of satisfaction time and time again.
The Importance of Customer Service
Think of customer satisfaction as the secret sauce for building strong customer relationships. The more satisfied a customer is with your brand, the more likely they are to continue doing business with you and spread the good gospel of your brand. The importance of customer service cannot be emphasized enough because it tells your client that you are dedicated to their needs. It tells them that you value their loyalty. It tells them that you care.
Today’s customers want more personalized experiences, and if your business can offer these consistently, then you’re well on your way to keeping them happy and retaining them. When it comes to customer service, your first line of communication is your customer service team. From your website to social media, they are the ones with whom customers first make contact your business. This is where providing a superior customer support experience comes into play.
As the figures show, you need to consistently deliver high-value experiences to keep your customers satisfied:
- 65% of American consumers are more likely to spend on brands and products that have excellent customer service
- 81% of satisfied customers are more likely to do business with you again if they have a positive experience
- 95% of customers will “take action” after a negative experience – like sharing concerns with friends and family, or churning
- 50% of customers will purchase from a competitor if they do not feel like they are valued or appreciated.
Moreover, if you increase your customer retention by 5%, you can boost your profits by up to 25%. This is because recurring customers are more likely to spend bigger, particularly because trust and credibility have already been established. Another study found that repeat customers may spend up to 300% more on your brand, which further highlights the importance of customer service.
There is no doubt that great customer experiences are key to customer retention. With that, here are some proven tips to help you improve retention rates through your customer service strategy.
1) Simplify Your Processes
Making shopping experiences simple and seamless raises customer satisfaction levels – which in turn increases sales. Making each customer experience with your enterprise as simple, intuitive, and user-friendly as possible will also have a powerful impact on your company’s ability to better compete in the marketplace.
One of the best ways to accomplish this goal is through simplifying and clarifying processes that are necessary for completing transactions, and an important focus area for accomplishing this objective is to improve the “point-of-sale” transaction process. By doing so, you will build greater loyalty from both existing customers and potential new ones. Entities that do not provide information easily or have complicated checkout processes, for instance, may cause frustration, causing many customers to abandon their carts and look to your competitors.
Amazon.com, one of the world’s largest and most recognizable eCommerce companies, has built a reputation for outstanding customer service and is, arguably, the industry leader in transaction ease. Amazon’s “1-Click” purchasing solution was seen as a remarkable piece of technology in the early days of eCommerce because it made the purchasing process simple and easy for their customers. This system foresaw the benefit that would arise from making a simple and easy transaction process.
“The idea that consumers could enter in their billing, shipping, and payment information just once and then simply click a button to buy something going forward was unheard of when Amazon secured the patent in 1999, and it represented a breakthrough for the idea of hassle-free online shopping.”
– University of Pennsylvania Law School.
The digital space is an excellent way to reach out to customers. But it’s important to realize that customers generally have short attention spans, so focus less on the bells and whistles and, instead, focus more on making sure your visitors get the information they need fast. Your digital presence is a direct reflection of your brand so ensure that your website—a potential client's main access point to your business—is user-friendly and can be navigated easily so to enhance the visitor experience and drive conversions. Disjointed processes can cost you heavily, and they can be burdensome on your team members as well.
To simplify your processes, there are tools you can leverage to help you streamline and scale. Helpware’s intuitive software, for example, can help transform and supercharge the overall customer experience through API and integration-enabled human task services. Our leadership team understands partnerships are earned and provides everything possible to ensure an amazing experience for you and your customer.
2) Forge Connections With Your Customers
Customer expectations are ever-evolving and businesses need to consistently create superior personalized customer experiences to create durable relationships. Building strong, enduring relationships with your customers is key to developing customer loyalty.
In the digital space, personalization can take many different forms. Many businesses use personalized emails to connect with new and old customers, customizing their content according to customer preferences. Your brand can, for example, offer smart predictions based on customers’ shopping behaviors to lead your customers to products or services they are more likely to be interested in. You can also use a smart customer service portal that allows agents to see previous conversations and interactions with a customer to better assess a situation. This way, you show your customers that you are willing to go the extra mile to ensure they have a smooth shopping experience.
To effectively personalize your customer service and marketing strategies, a data-driven approach is crucial. This can be achieved through data analytics to gain insight into things such as customers’ shopping behaviors, for instance.
Providing a highly personalized customer service support system to your customers will let them know you care, further solidifying their relationship with your brand. Helpware’s email support, chat support, call center, and multilingual support services are designed for just this purpose and can personalize your customer’s experience with your brand by effectively connecting them to a designated support team. Our custom-built teams are hand-picked and trained to understand the why behind every customer interaction so people always feel special and supported.
3) Show Empathy
It is no longer enough for companies to provide fast and friendly service to their customers. In today’s fast-paced digital world, this should already be a given. In fact, customers already expect this from the brands they support. Apart from expecting a highly personalized shopping experience, customers are seeking to do business with brands that show empathy and are more humanized and more likely to do business with a brand that reflects and prioritizes their personal values. Move over B2B and B2C... H2H (human-to-human) is the new watchword.
Many brands today incorporate certain values into their respective brand stories, and they use these to create further resonance. Research shows that 54% of today’s customers are more likely to purchase products and services from brands that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and 63% of customers are also more likely to buy from businesses that practice social responsibility. Brands must take note and include these values in their overall business strategies to connect more deeply with their customers.
Empathy is best showcased through customer service. Your customer service team needs to be in tune with customer needs to better understand customer concerns while offering solutions. This goes a long way in bolstering a personalized customer service strategy while ensuring that your customers’ experience with your brand always remains positive.
4) Take Customer Feedback Into Account
Customer feedback is vital. This is because customers can give you key insights on how to further improve your service and provide you with suggestions for potential solutions. Keep in mind, though, that there is a difference between asking for feedback and acting on it. Merely asking is not enough. Customers need to see that you are taking action towards making your service better.
If a customer offers feedback and they see concrete examples that their feedback was acted on, they will trust you more. This in turn helps build customer loyalty and improve customer retention rates. By asking your customers for feedback, they feel their opinions are valued. And when customers feel they are being listened to, they’re likely to buy more.
With Helpware, you can provide your customers with a platform to give their opinions and input. Helpware’s chat support teams allow your customers to engage with you at any time, from any device to resolve any issue. Our custom teams drive higher customer satisfaction, deliver significant cost savings, provide business continuity, and assist live agents to enrich the customer experience. Our email support teams establish good communication with customers focused on building trust. You can even implement a multilingual support service to accommodate diverse customers.
These spaces are excellent avenues for your customers to provide feedback, further enhancing the customer experience. Helpware’s outsourced support teams are designed to serve modern companies across the globe using cutting-edge digital tools. We offer support in 25 different languages, empowering you to communicate with your global customer base in their own language. How's that for personalization!
5) Keep Your Employees Happy
“If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients,” billionaire entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson believes. In fact, Branson continues, clients do not come first. Employees do. Branson's Virgin group comprises over 400 companies and the British-born entrepreneur has always been a firm and passionate advocate of getting things right internally before focusing on the external elements, including clients.
You might have super systems, world-class tech, and cutting-edge design enabling systems, processes, surveys, insights… all valuable and worthwhile tools to build and measure customer satisfaction. However, most efforts will come to naught if there are no people driving these. Sure, there are processes and platforms and how your customers choose to engage, but if you don’t have highly engaged people, you’ve most likely lost your key to success. If this base is not built on strong foundations, with motivated people at the heart of it all, nothing a business attempts will come to fruition.
Employees are the first consumer touchpoint, and what is ultimately delivered to the customer is heavily influenced by what happens behind the scenes. A bad customer experience has likely been brought about by poor employee training or management, for example, which is why it's critical that your core staff represent your company in the best light at all times.
Unhappy, disengaged employees also tend to have a negative impact on your business’s overall productivity levels, and this could lead to a higher turnover rate. It will also lower the overall efficiency of your business, as your employees may not be as motivated to perform. In fact, 69% of employees say that feeling demotivated or hostile towards their work impedes their ability to do their work to the best of their abilities.
The employee experience is often viewed as distinct from the customer experience, and yet, the two are inextricably linked. Companies that understand this critical connection are well on their way to a comprehensive solution that takes in both happy employees and happy customers.
Keeping your employees engaged can help supercharge your business’s operations too. Performance levels can rise up to 202% for companies with engaged employees, significantly outperforming companies with a poor employee experience. Remember, your company is only as strong as your team, so investing in systems and strategies that enhance employee experience is key to ensuring overall business success.
Meet and Exceed Customer Expectations With Helpware
Your customer service operation is one of the most important assets you have in terms of enhancing customer satisfaction and improving customer retention. If your customers are reveling in great experiences with your brand, they’re more likely to come back (and refer their friends). One single bad experience and they’ll walk. Good customer service can mean the difference between building a loyal army of faithful users and losing business altogether.
If you want to retain your customers, then lose sight of the importance of customer service. This principle can be applied in any industry and really does help develop a strong culture of customer service that gives consumers compelling reasons to stay with your company. Something as simple as displaying products along with prices on your website instead of requiring the user to download a PDF can go a long way in retaining customers.
Helpware empowers you to connect with customers where they are. Our smart solutions help you deliver transformative digital customer experiences through a suite of fully integrated business process outsourcing that drives satisfaction, brand loyalty, and customer retention – including call center, answering service, IT, chat, technical, and email support.
We tailor a team of the right people with the right skills across all customer channels to optimize your customer service strategy so you can secure a competitive advantage. We believe when people thrive, customers thrive too. And when we all thrive, the world becomes a better place.
Reach out to the Helpware team today, and together, let's deliver customer moments that really matter and relationships that last!
.svg)
.svg)
