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It is now a fact that companies and consumers are today in a very different relationship with each other compared to a few decades ago. Before advertisements were product-oriented and customers looked at a low price and high quality as essential characteristics for their purchases.
Today advertising is consumer-oriented and focuses on the (positive) experience that the use of the advertised product has on the customer himself. The user experience and customer experience today are the pivots of the company-consumer relationship. In this context, you can easily understand how important it is for a business to invest in what is called customer care.
The added value that determines the choice between competing brands is customer care (and customer service). The consumer increasingly chooses the brand that focuses on his needs and constantly provides him with value beyond the initial purchase. All of this is customer care. What can you do, if you have a business (on or offline) or if you are a professional who offers services to your users to enhance your customer care?
The 5 important things to know in customer care this year
2020 has just begun and what better time to start implementing customer support? Here, among the most important things, those that you can immediately put into practice.
1) Speak like your customers
The starting point of successful empathic communication is to set the message on the recipient. In other words, speak like your customers. Remember that your customers want conversations (and in the most immediate way possible), not formal correspondence. Be friendly, informal and nice. Also in the follow-up emails that communicate to the user that his request for assistance has been accepted.
Speaking like your customers also means using positive language. This “ploy” is a great way to avoid conflicts with your audience, for example, if a user writes to you because he has not received his order or because the product he wants is not currently available. What you can do to keep customer satisfaction high is called redirecting the conversation from negative to positive points and always offers the customer a solution.
Do you want an example? The one proposed by Help Scout, a platform that deals with customer support, seems very effective to us. We assume that the product ordered by the customer is not currently available.
- Negative language: “I can’t get you that product until next month. At the moment it is tidied up and unavailable. “You can easily grasp the consequences of this message.
- Positive language: “That product will be available next month. I can place the order for you right now and make sure it is sent to you as soon as it reaches our warehouse! ”. Things change, right? You have however communicated the unavailability of a product, but you have proposed a solution to remedy your customer.
Excellence in anything increases your potential in everything
What does it mean? Establish clear communication with your client. Immediately. Excelling in customer care will allow you to perceive yourself as an excellent all-round brand. Tone and style influence communication when dealing with customer care. So also be careful not to:
- Use aggressive tones or negative/passive language
- Confuse the customer with technicalities
- Treat it as a “number” and don’t make it feel like it’s at a bureaucratic desk.
It is also important not to neglect after-sales support. When you try to outsource telemarketing to the Philippines, agents still practice active listening and providing solution to callers even after a customer has purchased a product. Understand that customer care doesn’t end when a lead has been converted to sales.
2) Sorry for any inconvenience
Many manuals that dispense good customer care rules clearly say they treat the customer “like gold”. Out of metaphor, what you definitely have to do is respect the time of your customer (who has a hectic life just like yours) and respect the customer himself as he has received a disservice in relation to a product/service purchased from you.
So whatever the problem, whatever the role your whiteboard animation company plays, apologize to the customer. You will soon see the positive effects of a sincere apology when an angry customer contacts you for explanations!
The statistics (American, but still applicable also by us) highlight the power of excellent customer care. The numbers reveal it:
- 73% of customers fall in love with a brand and remain loyal thanks to friendly customer service
- 68% of customers said that the service representative was the key to a recent positive service experience (source: American Express)
- 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies that offer excellent customer service. (Source: Hub Spot research).
3) Act as soon as possible
One of the strengths of excellent customer care is a rapid action. An efficient customer service team does not accumulate requests. It acts quickly to save the customer time, company time and to ferry company and customer towards a timely resolution of the dispute (possibly without redirects).
To allow you to act as soon as possible, therefore, abandon most of the formalities such as traditional letters or e-mails and concentrate on the new tools made available especially by social networks and chatbots. Having live chat, for example, is the first big step towards rapid problem solving and efficient customer care.
4) Use technology, it’s a trump card
Today technology provides you with perfectly sustainable solutions in terms of technical know-how and costs that can help you a lot in providing your customers with satisfactory customer experience. We talked about live help and chatbots (via the company website and via social channels). To use them you can buy and install the software to run on your site or activate the bot for the Telegram channel or for the Facebook page.
Here too the statistics reported by Hub Spot are clear:
- Your online conversion rate can improve by about 8% when you include personalized consumer experiences (Source: Trust Pilot)
- 71% of consumers (aged between 16 and 24) believe that a quick response from the support team can exponentially improve their customer experience (Source: Comm100)
- 90% of customers find an immediate response important or very important when they have a question about customer service. 60% of customers define “immediate” at least 10 minutes. (Source: Hub Spot research).
5) Do you think you have to bear exorbitant costs? You are wrong
An automation and customer experience company – recently wrote an interesting article on his corporate blog entitled “11 customer care trends that will lead you to success in 2020”. Beyond the high-sounding and somewhat Americanizing title, they gave excellent news to all entrepreneurs and also to all. From this year onwards, more and more companies will relocate customer service “at home”. In other words, they will outsource their customer care service to freelance consultants and the results.
For businesses will be a win-win because thanks to technology and to the recruitment of freelance you can reduce costs related to the rental of workspaces and training of employees who until recently did not take care of advanced customer care. It will be a winning solution because more and more companies will seek their professionalism to remotely manage the customer support of their business. It will, therefore, become one of the markets of the near future in which it is worth acquiring the right expertise to spend to your advantage. Seeing is believing.
