Customer service excellence has become a necessity, as evidenced by companies with stellar services seeing increased loyalty from their customers (140% more spending!). Companies that excel at customer care receive rewards in terms of increased sales as a result.
How can you stand out in customer service? Below are Innovative Customer Service Techniques That Impress Clients; these tactics will allow you to form relationships and demonstrate that you care.
1. Use a Chatbot
If your team can’t respond immediately to each customer inquiry, a simple yet cost-effective way to reassure customers who may have reached out is sending out automated messages with information on when to expect a reply – particularly beneficial if your customers live across various time zones.
However, chatbots should never replace human support agents; even the best-trained chatbot will miss questions that require more personalized care or in-depth product knowledge.
To prevent this from happening, consider implementing an AI chatbot that can answer simple queries and collect essential data at the outset of an interaction, freeing your human reps up to focus on more complex issues and reduce wait times and speed up problem resolution. Furthermore, your chatbot could mimic user language or tone to ensure an authentic customer service experience and better transition between chatbot and agent responses.
2. Embrace Automation
Customer service automation can not only save businesses money and increase competitiveness, but not every company is willing to implement this technology. Therefore, introducing these tools slowly can allow your staff members and customers to become acquainted with them prior to full implementation on all communication channels.
Automated systems can also help your business save operational costs, including labor expenses associated with customer email responses. A properly implemented automation tool may even increase ticket resolution rates.
However, it’s essential to keep human interaction at the core of customer service delivery, since customers expect empathy, respect, and personalization from any company they purchase from. Thus, striking the appropriate balance between efficiency and human touch must be maintained.
3. Make It Personal
Personalizing customer service techniques is an effective way of wowing clients, as it shows you understand them as individuals and see their worth as customers. Doing this can make clients feel valued more, leading to greater loyalty and satisfaction among your clients.
One way of doing this is to mirror their language and phrasing; this makes them feel that you’re both working toward solving their issue together, making it easier for them to receive any needed information.
Another effective strategy is being proactive. For example, if one of your products will soon be out-of-stock, send them an email informing them to save them time and disappointments while also showing that you care about them as customers while building up trust among your clientele. It will build great customer relations for everyone involved – including yourself!
4. Be Creative
Customer service goes beyond traditional departments and job titles, requiring creativity to surprise and delight customers in unique ways. Everyone knows of Morton’s going above and beyond to give a customer their steak after asking in an online tweet, but businesses have many more everyday examples they can use to surprise and delight their customers.
If a customer contacts your business through social media, reply directly with a direct message to address their inquiries and offer the help they require without subjecting them to lengthy phone queues.
Utilizing video archives as a customer service strategy is another innovative customer service method. Not only can this save customers time by eliminating hold times, but it will also demonstrate your business’s expertise at solving common problems. Making these videos can be done easily using tools already utilized by your team when recording training videos for new hires.