In these times of instant gratification, customer service is the buzzword for businesses.
Also known as customer-centricity, it is a way of conducting business that provides patrons with a pleasant experience throughout the buyer journey.
Consequently, it helps boost the brand’s bottom line, improves customer loyalty, and enhances overall growth.
Built around the idea of how much they can change their customers’ lives, Amazon is a great example of ideal customer service.
Their commitment to consistently delivering value via great customer service is authentic — and it shows. Not only Amazon, but other businesses who orient themselves around their customer service strategy find themselves in good stead too.
Want to join the bandwagon?
In this post, let’s take a look at some strategies you can employ to increase the quality of your customer service and consequently drive repeat business.
1. Find Your Customers’ Preferred Channels
Before you start formulating a detailed customer service strategy, figure out how and where you are going to reach your customers.
Find their most preferred support channels so that you can meet them where they already are, erasing the hassle of them having to find you.
Don’t know how to find out which channels your customers frequent?
You can conduct a poll with a simple Google Form to create a one-question survey and send it to potential and existing customers.
It’s an easy way to figure out their preferences.
Take, for example, the customer service strategy of KLM Airlines.
Knowing that most of their customers were on LinkedIn, they made it their primary support channel. Customers who were already on LinkedIn could get to KLM’s support team anytime they wanted to, resulting in a win-win situation for both.
Image via Groovehq
2. Automate Your Customer Service With AI Tools
AI has assumed center stage in most customer service strategies today, and it’s not surprising to see why.
Its mammoth potential to provide instant customer support regardless of volume tickles the fancy of everyone.
With it, you can leverage the data from your customer journey maps and automate the sticking points of customer service by automating them.
Take, for instance, intelligent chatbots.
Chatbots enable businesses to solve customer queries, provide relevant recommendations, and even collect customer data.
Additionally, these bots also help you determine the right touchpoint to introduce live chat for more sophisticated requests.
Adding a special option for live chat helps you reroute more specific queries to live support agents where a chatbot might not be able to service them satisfactorily.
This fortifies your customer service strategy while also making provisions for personalized service through live chat.
3. Foster an Empathetic Environment
Although automated support through AI has very much upended the standard of customer service, the human sentiment still remains quintessential to a great customer service strategy.
It is the culture of your company that defines your customer service. So, it is only logical that in order to provide great customer service, it has to be entrenched into the company culture first-hand.
To build a truly consumer-centric company, organizations need to reorient their workforce and train employees in the art of empathy. They need to learn how to exchange knowledge transparently to build endearing customer relationships.
Empathy can reinforce the belief of the customer in your product. Make an effort to listen to their problems intently. It’s also important to be approachable and help them in any way possible.
Empathy is the key to building long-lasting relationships with customers. If you’re empathetic, your customers are more likely to trust you, leading to a subsequent boost in customer retention and loyalty.
4. Leverage Segmentation
Personalized content is an effective form of targeting customers than just sending out mass emails. It can improve your customer experience and boost customer satisfaction levels.
Wondering how to go about it?
Use specialized platforms for email marketing.
The rise of machine learning has enabled businesses to design algorithms that can track a customer’s email and website browsing data to get a sense of the kind of content they engage with.
With this information, you can precisely identify relevant content for the user and target them with custom recommendations through personalized emails.
With email segmentation, you can send personalized offers to your subscribers based on their past purchases.
When users come across content and offers that are tailored to their preferences, they are more likely to take action.
5. Provide Omnichannel Customer Service
Your prospects can use multiple social media channels to look up your products and find out more about your brand. That’s why it’s important to be present on multiple channels and provide a consistent experience.
Providing omnichannel customer service helps you deliver a holistic care experience. Support agents need context in the form of prior engagement history of customers while trying to sort out their issues.
With an omnichannel support strategy, they can get a 360-degree view of customer expectations from your product.
That’s not all.
It also eliminates communication barriers between teams and makes for a seamless service experience for the user.
Furthermore, with the help of advanced support software, you can also gather reports on engagement and channel analytics. This can help direct your efforts towards maintaining and improving your customer interactions.
Ready to Drive Repeat Business?
Orienting your offerings to the customer’s needs and convenience is the very basis of customer care. If you want to win over your customers and improve their experiences, you need to build a customer-centric strategy.
For this, you need to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and realize how you can maximize the value you offer.
Businesses that understand this can unlock the true potential of the customer lifetime value, leading to improved business all around.
Do you have any questions related to developing a solid customer service strategy? Please mention them in the comments section.
Infographic via acquire.io
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