In today's world, every product has an alternative, and no matter how good yours is, you can still lose customers. What truly sets a company apart is the quality of its customer service. Great service leaves lasting impressions on both existing and potential customers.
Surveys show that nearly 50% of customers switch brands after a bad service experience. To thrive, you must constantly improve your customer service to maintain strong customer relationships. Understanding customer expectations is crucial, and we're here to help.
In this blog post, we'll explore key customer expectations and share tips and examples for delivering outstanding service. By the end, you'll know how to make your customer service memorable and effective.
Overview: Customer Expectations
Technological advancements and the Internet era have made customers more powerful than ever before.
Nowadays, customers can search for alternatives and compare different brands before making a purchase, take free trials for products that they want to buy, and even share their experiences with the world. This implies that customer expectations from a company and their customer service are higher due to which it is essential to meet their service expectations.
To deliver exceptional customer service, it will be beneficial to know the expectations that your customers have from your brand. A simple brainstorming can actually help you identify the areas where your customer service is lagging.
Basic Customer Expectations
So, here are a few basic customer expectations that we have pointed out to give you some ideas for this brainstorming.
To be heard, valued, and appreciated
Whenever a customer reaches out to you, they expect solutions to their problems. They want you to listen to them, value their words, and appreciate their efforts.
Easy solutions without any friction
If your customers need to face too many roadblocks or barriers, they will feel disheartened and demotivated to reach out to you. They want you to make the process simple and easy.
Immediate action on complaints
Customers come to you for solutions as they expect you to solve the issues they are facing. They expect you to take action on their complaints as they can only trust you for this.
Quick response
Nobody has time to spend hours on just solving an issue for which they have spent money. They expect you to quickly respond to their queries, approximately within 24 - 48 hours.
Convenient communication channel
Customers are used to the flexibility of communicating through various platforms. They expect you to be on the platform where they are most comfortable. So, you need to create various sources of communication for all your customers with different choices.
11 Tips to Deliver Exceptional Customer Service
Meeting customer expectations is crucial to not fall short in customers’ eyes while offering the services. A customer will not make any further purchases from a company with whom he had a bad service experience. So, a company needs to deliver smooth and excellent customer service to retain existing customers and acquire new ones.
So, here are some tips to help you with delivering exceptional customer services that will meet your customers’ expectations.
Ask questions for better clarity
The first and foremost thing to do is to know your customers well. Identify who your customers are, why they invested in your product, what they expect from the product or company, and what they liked or disliked about your product. Knowing your customers will help you to have meaningful personalized interactions with them.
Apart from this, it’s important to maintain clarity and be on the same page with customers. You can even ask questions to your customers about whether they understood properly. Also, clarify their doubts in case they have any.
Be empathetic, patient, and consistent
No matter how annoying the customer's questions are, you need to empathize with them, be patient, and stay consistent with answering all their questions.
Prepare and train your customer support team for this so that they can build good relationships with customers and generate high customer loyalty.
Actively listen and communicate clearly
Make your customers feel heard through proactive listening. Try to make them feel valued through your gestures. Ask your customer support team to tell customers that they are being heard and action will be taken based on that.
Apart from proactive listening, clear communication is also an integral part of customer service success. Build your customer’s perception of your brand through positive language, concise speech, and tone of communication.
Train your customer service team to be careful with their words such as avoiding using slang, technical jargon, or aggressive tone. Keep your words and communication simple and understandable.
Mistakes are common! Admit it
Mistakes are common as we all are humans. Even companies can make mistakes because after all they are run by humans. Mistakes can happen despite being careful. So, if it’s your mistake, accept and apologize for it even if nobody noticed it.
It will build trust and restore customers’ confidence in your brand. Early detection and acceptance of mistakes can bring situations under control and give time to fix the issue. So, be active and keep a check on everything carefully.
Make personalization a priority
As humans, we crave human connections. While trying to find solutions to problems, your customers expect to have conversations with humans like themselves.
So, even if you are trying your best to solve customer issues, don’t forget to add a personal touch and make your conversations as human as possible. Personalization will promote customer loyalty and increase cooperation from the customers’ side.
Let customers help themselves
Most of the time people prefer to do things on their own. So let your customers find solutions to their problems on their own. You can create chatbots, separate FAQ sections on your website, or create knowledge bases including blogs, articles, etc. that will help customers solve minute problems on their own.
This way your customers don't need to spend a lot of time and come to you every time they have some trouble. Also, create a self-service helpdesk so that customers can avail of your services better.
Find creative solutions
Solving customer problems should be the central motive of the customer support team as customers can churn due to bad experiences.
Always try to solve problems creatively in a way that is unexpected for your customers. For instance, if a customer reported some functioning issue while dealing with your software, you can fix that issue and offer some further gifts or discounts for the future to compensate for the inconvenience they had.
Going a little beyond to solve customer problems will give you committed and loyal customers for life.
Be quick in responses
The best customer experience you can deliver is by valuing your customers’ time. Speed should be the essence of your customer service so try to solve customer queries as quickly as possible.
Respond quickly to issues that don’t take much time and take your time to solve complex issues but inform your customers about the estimated time that it will take. Also, don't be in a hurry to close the ticket without solving the issue as it can affect your company's image.
Stick to your words
Customers trust you that’s why they invest in your products. So, you must keep up with their trust. Always stick to your words and fulfill your promises.
If you have, for instance, promised that the issue will be resolved within 24 hours, make sure that this happens. If not, try to compensate for that. But always make sure that you fulfill your promise so that customers can trust your brand for life.
Follow-up and send a Thank You note
Your job has not ended yet. Once the problem is solved, follow up with your customers and ask for their feedback. Request your customers to give their valuable feedback on whether the issue is completely resolved and if they are satisfied with the service.
Also, ask them if they have any other issues with your product and end the conversation with a thank you note.
Examples of Companies with Good Customer Service
After knowing these tips to deliver exceptional customer service, here are some examples of good customer service that you can take inspiration from.
Adobe
Adobe is a great example of good customer service as it identified the issue before its customers and informed them about it to reduce the inconvenience.
Once Adobe faced an outage due to an issue with Amazon Web Services for which it posted a tweet to inform its customers. The tweet had a video of a puppy that was adored by its customers.
It’s better to identify the issue earlier and tell your customers that you are trying to fix it.
American Express
Another example of good customer service is American Express which offers plenty of extra benefits to its customers that work across boundaries.
These benefits include complimentary travel flight credit, insurance, etc. along with a 24/7 support line of American Express and its global partners' network.
Since customers travel and they want services to be available wherever they go, it’s a great customer service that American Express offers.
Tesla
Tesla is a great car company that offers home visits to their customers whenever they have any issues with their cars.
This customer service by Tesla saves the time and effort of its customers as they don’t need to queue at the repair shop for hours to get the fix done.
Customers value time and convenience and they can even pay more for it. The only need is for the companies that can offer such services.
Gains from Customer Service Efforts
Great customer service helps companies to create a loyal customer base and helps to differentiate them from competitors. Treat the customer the way they want and try to solve their problems as much as possible in the simplest ways.
Using the tips highlighted in this blog will surely help you achieve your goals of exceptional customer service delivery. For this purpose, you can use tools such as Olvy that can help you collect feedback from customers so that you can act on their suggestions or solve their problems.
Using this tool will simplify your feedback collection process and will fasten the actions based on that feedback. Along with that Olvy takes away your task of creating feedback forms by offering readymade templates for different purposes.
If you have the privilege then why not take advantage of it? Try Olvy once and see the difference yourself.
