By Andrew Tillery
Brands breathe. You can create a product, build a company, and hire employees, but the moment you land your first customer is the moment your brand is born. Just as it is for any proud new parent, it is up to you to protect your newborn from the dangers of the outside world.
Nothing is more harmful to your brand than a poor customer support experience. Even if a customer receives an extremely flawed product, they are far more likely to forgive and forget this experience if they feel like the company listens to them, cares about their experience, and makes a genuine effort to improve their situation. This level of care and attention can be expensive and difficult to maintain.
It is no wonder why there are thousands of tools and strategies designed to make supporting customers easier for companies trying to build their brand. Even though many of these can be helpful, it is important to keep in mind that no matter what you are selling, when your product moves off the shelf or the services have been rendered, and revenue comes in, that isn’t just a sale; that is a relationship activity between you and your customer. That means regardless of what you are selling, you are in the business of relationships—and relationships take work.
Even though creating a solid customer support experience requires a substantial amount of energy and effort, the path is fairly simple when you pay attention. We are all customers of brands we enjoy and we all know how we want to be treated. By spending some time creating a strategy and following a few helpful tips, you can create an experience that will establish and cement your customers as lifelong fans of your brand.
Here are six ways to elevate your customer service to superstar status:
1. Set expectations early and clearly
One of the easiest ways to clear up any potential customer issue is to clearly define what the expectations should be. As we mentioned earlier, you are curating a relationship. The goal should be to set up the relationship for success from the very beginning. This means you should clearly communicate what the customer can expect from your products and/or services as well as make sure your policies are easy to understand, easy to access, and easy to follow.
Information that is easy to access and understand is your front line of defense against a poor customer experience. Mastering this can set you apart from your competition, improve overall interactions with your customers, and protect your brand from the cancer of confusion.
Strategy tip: Start by looking at each customer question as a wrinkle in the customer life cycle. Each time you try to smooth out one of these wrinkles, ask yourself two questions: “At what point does the customer run into this question?” and “How can I provide the answer to this question before it occurs to the customer to ask?” Each time you can effectively answer these questions and deploy the appropriate responses, your efforts will, from that point on, continue to reward you and your future customers.
2. Stay engaged and responsive in your channels of communication
Regardless of how clearly you define what the expectations should be, relationships still require communication. Creating the ability for your customers to “self-serve” can be an incredibly valuable asset. However, if customers have no way of connecting to an actual person, they can quickly translate that into feeling like they aren’t heard, cared about, or listened to.
The quality of service and level of engagement should be your measure of success here. Stay as active and responsive as you can, across as many channels of communication as your company can effectively support.
Strategy tip: Data continues to show that companies who are able to connect their customers directly to a live person have a distinct advantage over companies with limited or no live phone support. Many small businesses utilize call centers with phone agents available to service calls 24 hours a day.
3. Make positive language core to communication
Much of the language we use to communicate carries with it a charge of energy that is received by the people we are talking to. Recognizing this and making subtle changes in the words we choose can make a big difference in how we are received by customers.
Next time you are interacting with a customer, take note of your sentence structure and phrasing. You will almost always be able to identify when communication is posed in the positive or in the negative. Choosing to pose communications positively tends to leave the customer with a positive outlook on the interaction. Seems obvious, right? Maybe so, but that doesn’t make it easy.
Strategy tip: Next time you are dealing with a customer who had a bad experience with a product or service, try using a positive statement like “Thank you for…” (e.g., Thank you for letting us know about this experience. Let me see what I can do to make it right.”) that communicates gratitude that the customer came to you with the issue. Use it instead of a negative statement like “I’m sorry…” (e.g., “I’m sorry that happened. That is not how our product is supposed to work.”) that communicates regret regarding the customer experience.
RELATED: Satisfy an Angry Customer by Following the 3 R’s
4. Enable your customer support staff
The only thing more frustrating than struggling to get in touch with customer support is finally getting connected to someone who is ill-equipped to help. Enable your customer support staff with the training and information they need to handle any and all common questions that might come in about your product or services. To further enhance the ability of your team to service customers, provide them a process or path of communication to more specialized resources for when more difficult questions come in.
Finally, whenever reasonably possible, consider giving your customer service staff the ability to unilaterally make decisions that will service the customers’ needs (i.e., refunds, discounts, shipping damages, etc.).
Strategy tip: If you are able, try rotating your team around so they can be exposed to other areas of your business. The more they understand about how your company works, the more likely they will be able to spot opportunities that could help them serve the customer.
5. Inspect what you expect
It is easy to put a process in place and simply assume things are operating as they are supposed to. The truth is, processes can break down or become obsolete over time. Sometimes the best thing you can do to identify where to improve your customer service is to go through the process as if you were the customer.
Give placing an order a try. Call in to customer support and check on the status of your order. Cancel your order at the last minute. Dial your business to schedule an appointment for service at 10 p.m. and see how that goes. You may be surprised where issues pop up that you would have expected to be business as usual.
Strategy tip: Once you identify an area where a process breaks down, identify when the process will be fixed with your team and then make sure to schedule future dates to revisit this issue and ensure it was truly resolved. Even the process of fixing processes can break down from time to time.
6. ID metrics for success and set goals
Now that you have laid down much of the basic strategies towards building a sustainable superstar customer support system, it is time you identified the metrics to measure your success. These can vary greatly, depending on your type of business. For example, your business model may be best served if you tie support and sales together as a measure of success. Or, if you have a support ticket system in place, have your team set goals based on the customer feedback and success rates from those support tickets.
Strategy tip: Once you are able to consistently hit your customer service goals, change them. Set new goals that are more challenging to hit and constantly push your business to improve. Brands that never settle for “meets expectations” are the ones that earn loyal customers and huge fan bases.
Whatever the metric is, you can begin to set goals and work towards demonstrating the progress your business is making in customer support. However, the true metric will always be the relationship with your customers.
If you take these tips into consideration, truly explore how your company can implement them, and dedicate yourself to a culture of service, you’ll surly achieve the status of customer service superstar.
RELATED: Top 10 Customer Service Mistakes
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