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Many of us have interacted with customer support teams for crucial conditions such as blocking a credit card or booking an air ticket. Imagine a situation where you have sensed an unauthorized activity through your credit card and want to block it immediately. If you don’t get agile and apt support from your bank at such a critical junction, would you like to continue with their credit card service anymore? The bank would probably lose a customer permanently.
On the other hand, if you get immediate assistance and can block your card successfully, you are mentally relieved, and at the end of the call, you may leave positive feedback and provide some references if requested. Hence, customer satisfaction and retention depend on how efficiently the support team handles the query.
Customer conversations are the most crucial aspect of customer support, but several businesses cannot leverage them properly.
It is essential to understand that customers will ask for help when they need prompt actions and assistance, and if they are dissatisfied with your support services, you might lose the deal. Even if your customers have a wonderful experience with your product or service, they may not return if they are not satisfied with the customer service.
Let us look at how you can ensure positive feedback for your business and fetch satisfactory results for the customers.
1. Create & build a top-notch support team
Your customer support team front ends on behalf of your company. They are one of the critical resources for your business. Hence, hiring the right candidate and implementing full training sessions is crucial.
Before you begin the hiring process, define the skill set of the candidates. Do they need extensive technical knowledge about your products? Or are they simply problem solvers who are good at helping customers find answers? If you have a complex product or service, hiring agents who have experience dealing with it may be better. Once you have selected potential candidates for your team, ensure that they are curious to know how things work within your company—and set the right expectation before they start interacting with the customers.
Consider mapping the support inquiries categorically and assign a single team member who handles every query for that category. This streamlining will help the customers identify and refer the agents when talking over email or chat during their interaction with them. Additionally, it would make the team members highly efficient.
2. Understand your customers' pain points
“Customer is the king” is an age-old notion that signifies the importance of customers in any business. The daily deluge of your customer interactions proves the popularity of your business. Understanding what drives your customers' decisions and behaviour is vital to stay on demand and excel in every capacity. Talking to your customers and understanding their interests or pain points before pitching for any sale can be highly effective for the business.
Customers’ needs and preferences are constantly evolving. Hence your products and services must go through reformations continuously.
Ask yourself:
What are customers not telling me?
What kind of feedback do they have that they are not sharing?
How can I improve my product or service based on what they say?
If a customer has trouble using one part of your product or service, try to help with an alternative.
You can also ask for referrals from delighted customers; those referrals are the leads who can help you to innovate your products and services.
3. Focus on context, not just content
The best way to determine the right next step for your customers is to understand their goals and priorities. If you want to help them elevate their business, you must know where they are standing and what they are eyeing.
That means asking questions like:
What do you hope will happen when this project is over?
OR
Why do you need this?
OR
How will this benefit your organization?
You cannot anticipate what information a customer may need if you only focus on the details of your product.
4. Optimism goes a long way with customers
It is always better to talk about what could be than what is or is not. If you are having a conversation with your customer and they sound unhappy with something, do not focus on that aspect of their experience. Instead, try to figure out how they would like it to go in the future. That way, you can help them produce solutions together instead of just focusing on problems from the past.
When we think about our own experiences and how we want things to go in the future, it makes us hopeful about the changes and possibilities beyond our current reality—even if those possibilities are just "better" versions of the current situation. (e.g., Being able to get through traffic faster).
5. Encourage feedback from your customers
The vital step for having high-impact customer conversations is encouraging feedback from customers. Feedback can help you identify the areas of improvement in your product or service and make it robust and sustainable.
When asking for feedback, be specific about the type of feedback. For example: “What did we do well?” vs. “What could we have done better?”
Thank them for their time and input when they give you customer feedback. You do not want your customer to feel like he just wasted his breath!
After receiving customer feedback, take some time every week (or month) to review that data, analyze and find out the best means to implement it effectively as an organization moving forward into the future.
6. Context drives personalized interactions
Personalized interactions are not about being personal. They are about using all the information you have about your customers to get into a contextually tailored conversation for them.
But how do you get that information?
It is simple. Just have a general conversation with the customers! But be very clear that it is not about having regular customer conversations with every single person who uses your service. Instead, whenever you have a chance to talk with any customer, ask questions and listen to their answers carefully so that you can fetch more information about their requirements. Moreover, you can also get the historical data about the past interactions with your company or product, and any preferences they might have that are unique or relevant to this interaction specifically (e.g., if they prefer interacting by phone versus email).
7. Providing excellent
customer service requires focus, consideration, and confidence
To deliver excellent customer support service, you need to focus on their needs and ensure that your conversation is relevant to them.
It can help if you are con
fident in your approach; if not, there is nothing to worry about it! Customers do not expect everything you do to be perfect; they want someone who cares enough about them as a person (not just as a number on the bottom line).
In a nutshell
Companies that understand their audience a
nd leverage their feedback to upgrade their products and services can rapidly grow and sustain in the market.
The best way to do this is by fostering high-impact conversations between your employees and customers. With a proper plan for efficient customer support, you can improve every aspect of your company’s business model—from marketing strategies to product development.
The bottom line is that every custom
er conversation is an opportunity to make an impression. Some conversations are simple exchanges of information, but others can help your company make important decisions that benefit your business and customers for years to come.
Swapnil Jain
CEO-ORAI Robotics
Stay in contact with ORAI
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