Tag: Client Service Management

The Difference Between Customer Service and Customer Experience

April 13, 2018

There’s a big difference between customer experience and customer service. In this video, Entrepreneur Network partner Patrick Bet-David goes through the major differences between the two. Bet-David also recommends some exercises you can do to understand customer service at your business.

Customer service is reactive, where customer experience is proactive, Bet-David says. For example, customer service could be helping an upset client with an issue they are having with your product or service. Customer experience is providing things such as a loyalty rewards program or special promotions for customers’ birthdays.

How you treat your customers and the experience you create for them is key to running a successful business.

support services

6 secrets about customer service training that will boost your team’s results

April 4, 2018

While training and preparing your employees is clearly the first step taken by a good management team, it is nevertheless advisable to focus on what type of training they need and how to implement it. Below we will give you 6 secrets that will help you improve your customer service training and provide a significant boost to your business.

1. Train ALL your employees

Customer service is something that interests and concerns the entire company, not just a single department. In one way or another, the work of all your employees resonates with the end customer. For this reason, it is essential to provide customer service training instruction to your entire staff: not only will they be prepared to meet (or exceed) the expectations of users, but you will also be transmitting a consistent message across the company regarding the importance of customer service.

2. A coherent message: the customer comes first

While customer service training could include numerous technical aspects and personal skills, the essential message should be loud and clear: the customer comes first. These few words should waft throughout the organization as if they constituted a religious mantra. If your training is built upon this principle (which should be repeated until exhaustion), the foundation you are laying will help everything else run smoothly.

3. Practice, practice and continue practicing

If you want successful training, you have to commit to practice. Numerous studies confirm that experiential learning and learning by doing increase brain activity and the ability to memorize knowledge. Have your employees practice everything that they are learning so that they will never forget anything.

4. Exercise attitudes, positivity, and empathy

Many customer service training programs forget to teach the basics: kindness, empathy, positivity and courtesy. While many of these skills could appear naturally, the reality is that they must be reinforced and fostered throughout the company. Make sure that your courses drive home the need to be positive, smile, refer to the customer by name, remain calm, have patience and walk in our users’ shoes. Never assume that your employees are capable of doing all this in their day to day tasks.

5. Personalize your training

Every company is its own universe, and every customer support service is different. For this reason, if your company has some particular processes that you want to implement (welcome greeting, presentation of a product, packaging, closing a sale, returning an article, etc.), it is worth investing time into personalized training that satisfies the needs of your company and business.

6. Ongoing training: reinforce, reinforce and continue reinforcing

Customer service training should be a never-ending learning experience. Running a course during a month or two will neither significantly impact your staff nor improve your business’s figures. Employees (just like everyone else!) forget what they have learned and easily fall back into their old habits. It is thus essential to hold regular training courses (e.g., changing formats) to continue shoring up all the new knowledge and skills learned.

Business Services

6 Ways to Improve your Online Customer Service

March 21, 2018

From choosing the correct support channels to using online resources to get out of the way, to empowering teams to keep customer happiness a priority, understanding how to properly conduct online support is paramount to creating an amazing customer experience.

What follows are our best tips for improving your online service today.

1. Ask yourself: What are my customers’ support needs?

One of the most important things to consider when it comes to online customer service is finding what your customers typically need from your support team.

As an example: Say you’re looking for a company to host your website. You might want to make sure they offer live chat, since you’ll want to make sure you can get an immediate response should your site go down. In that instance, you don’t want to get sent through a ticket system or to a forum.

On the flip side, great companies like Loco2 have removed their phone number from their site and still provide the exceptional customer service they’re known for — because they’re keenly aware of what their customers’ needs are.

2. Get out of your customers’ way

Self-service can be an enormous benefit to your customers — not the hindrance you may perceive it to be.

One of the better examples out there can be found over at WooCommerce. The Woo team offers WordPress themes for site owners, many of these folks being beginners. If you’ve never run a website before, even on a relatively simple platform like WordPress, know that there can be myriad headaches and questions as you take your first steps.

3. …But don’t stop at knowledge base documentation

The idea of “content as customer service” is one that many businesses can benefit from.

We’ve taken this to heart at Help Scout, taking time to create a variety of customer service resources that run the gamut of free e-books, webinars, and whitepapers that aim to help people excel in customer support. When customers ask about these sorts of topics, we have a full suite of content pieces that can help them out, instead of creating a separate reply each and every time

4. Respect your customers’ time

Do you know how long your customers wait for an initial reply? Or how long the average time to resolution is? What about how many times a customer has to go back and forth with your team before they get their questions answered to their satisfaction?

The longer you make customers wait to hear from you, the more time you give them to start exploring your competitors’ offerings. We don’t have to tell you that what gets measured gets managed — unless you’re already keeping an eagle eye on your customer service metrics, chances are there are some opportunities for optimization.

5. Recognize that ‘online service’ ≄ ‘robotic service’

When you’re working with customers online, via email or chat, the temptation can be toward a just-the-facts-ma’am style — but a pleasant tone (or any specific tone, really) is more difficult to convey via text, where you don’t have additional signifiers like swings in vocal pitch or friendly body language.

Conveying empathy via your virtual tone is critical in online customer service. One crucial skill that goes a long way with customers is mirroring — matching their tone lets them know you’re on their side. When a customer is formal, keep your tone strictly professional. If they’re more casual, relax your tone too — it’s OK to crack a joke or include a funny GIF in your reply if the customer has sent you a queue that they have a sense of humor.

6. Empower your entire team to help customers

One of the biggest benefits of conducting most of your support online is definitely the flexibility, and empowering your entire team to talk with customers and handle their questions is critical if you want to turn your support from good to great.

Why take the risk of running into a customer service trainwreck? Create a customer-centric culture into your employee’s mindsets by having everyone do support. It won’t hinder their long-term company-specific skills, and it will make sure that each employee knows how to properly talk with customers.

Source: HelpScout