Happy and satisfied customers often buy products or services repeatedly and require minimal marketing effort to do so. They also introduce new customers, mostly by telling others about their good experiences. But, businesses often make a vital mistake; they ignore customer service and focus more on marketing and competitive pricing to increase sales. What they don’t realize is that by neglecting their customer service, they are losing money. In fact, according to this article in Forbes magazine, poor customer service is costing businesses more than $75 billion a year. Poor customer service is not always due to ignorance by the companies. Ensuring optimal customer service requires constant monitoring of the customer service team, customer queries, and feedback, etc. which is a mammoth task that is where most brands falter.
Customer service: Why is it challenging for companies to improve?
Monitoring customer service becomes an issue due to the lack of real-time data. Usually, the executives who are in charge of monitoring need to compile reports from various sources like IM services, Social media platforms, Emails, SMS, Chat systems, Cloud Telephony services, etc. This compiling is a daunting task in itself, and it takes time to prepare reports which are then analyzed. This time lag is one of the biggest challenges that companies face.
Due to manual reporting of data from various sources, it is not always possible to get detailed insights like :
- How many customers were upset?
- How many customers were assisted where they left with a positive impression
- How many of these customers were churned?
- Are higher priority customer service tickets being addressed on time?
- Is a high-value customer treated the same as a low-medium value customer?
- Is the team efficient with resolving issues?
- Are issues being addressed on time?
- Is the CLTV increasing with improved customer service if not, then why?
As a result of the lack of the above insights, companies fail to address critical points like :
- Identifying if the customer service team is adequately trained or if further training is required
- Whether the Customer Service team is understaffed and needs to be reinforced
- What should be the frequency in monitoring the team and creating reports?
- What type of customers are raising more tickets?
- What are the most common issues being brought up? Is it a technical fault or a vendor fault? f. Is it necessary to address customers with specific problems, or High-value customers, uniquely or differently?
Benefits of Good Customer Service
An excellent customer service-
- Increases the number of loyal customers who visit repeatedly
- This loyal customer base is more open to viewing more products and trying out new ones, increasing how often they purchase from you.
- This increases the amount of money each returning customer spends with your business
- Loyal customers generate positive word-of-mouth about your business and provide testimonials and reviews, which help organically increase new visitors.
- This ensures a minimum recurring revenue, decreased marketing budgets for customer retention, and increased budgets for new customer acquisition resulting in sustainable growth for the business.
How to Improve Customer Service?
Today, customer service is not limited to the traditional telephone support agent. This is because customers have a variety of media to interact with businesses like WhatsApp and other IM services, Social media platforms, Emails, and Chat systems on your website along with phone and SMS. Many companies also provide self-service support, so customers can to an extent find their own answers at any time of day or night.
Companies with the best customer support system-
- Track every move of their customers
- Have sophisticated chatbots or IVR systems installed to keep customers engaged before an actual operator is able to attend to the issue. Studies have shown that the most frustrating thing people have claimed when it comes to customer service is long waiting times, and most people lose their patience and this ultimately results in the issue remaining unresolved and customers losing faith in the brand.
- Listen to and reply to complaints on social media and emails, this creates an image of a brand that cares about its customers
- Ask for regular feedback, reviews, and suggestions from the customers to gain insights into their experience with your brand even if they are not complaining or reporting things.
- Provide support based on the activity of the customer like browsing habits, interesting products, response to marketing activities, etc, and provide tailor-made guidance to them to influence them in buying a product or a service.
Some of the strategies you can follow include-
- Understanding your customers’ needs and wants
- Treating your customers respectfully
- Acting on promises made to your customer
- Handling complaints and returns gracefully
- Exceeding customer expectations
- Going out of your way to help your customers.
How does Daton help in improving Customer Service?
Daton is a data pipeline that easily integrates with various apps and data sources and collects data regularly to feed it into a data warehouse so that it can be analyzed with relative ease. When it comes to improving customer service, Daton can integrate with various tools that you may use to provide customer service tile Zendesk, Tawk.LiveAgent, Freshservice, Salesforce, Zoho etc., your social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, your cloud telephony services like Exotel, Knowlarity, etc., your email tools like Mailchimp, Moosend, etc., along with your google analytics or website analytics data. Using Daton, you can easily collect real-time data from these sources, get detailed insights on your customers’ customer service experience, and quickly generate accurate reports so that the time lag in analyzing and taking steps for improvement is reduced.
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