In order to deliver superior customer service, you must understand the consumers’ definition of customer service. You must also understand how to combine between customer service department to other departments, as well as how to create the simplest self-service options for your website, and how to leverage customers feedback. Once you understand the above, it’s easier to deliver the best experience and service possible. Here, you can find 19 great articles, blog posts and interview from 2015, which can help you be the service provider you’ve always dreamed of being.
1. Improving Customer Satisfaction Levels
Customer satisfaction is considered to be the number one requirement for a successful business. There may be some differences regarding product, service, and area, but at the end of the day happy customers lead to happy business owners. Although improving customer satisfaction is not an easy process, and requires hard work and effort, it eventually pays off in success and profit. In this article you can learn how to improve these customer satisfaction levels.
2. Your New Shoes Are in The Mail: How Tech Has Changed Customer Service
The internet revolution saved us from spending time on tedious phone conversations whenever we need customer support. Amazon, one of the world’s ecommerce pioneers, improved their customer service and experience through technology. In this article, Jamie Chennells talks about the modern day consumers, who became more powerful (and spoiled) following the digital revolution.
3. Going Beyond Analytics to Understand Why Users Do What They Do
Mackey Craven of OpenView Venture Partners, highlights new crops of tools and platforms that are helping us understand the “why?” behind or customers’ and users’ actions. In this great article, Craven explains how to leverage Big Data and go beyond the “what our customers do” – to “why they do it”.
In the past, in order to collect customer feedback, you had to disrupt users’ experience by placing and observing them in a testing environment. Craven claims that Today’s new generation of user testing platforms remove this friction by allowing businesses to consistently and iteratively incorporate qualitative insights in the same way that they currently use analytics.
4. 5 Customer Service Fails That Will Make You Squirm
Did you or your employees ever argued over the phone with a customer? Ever told a customer they have zero fashion sense? In this article by B2C, you can find five customer service fails. B2C examine why things went so horribly wrong and offering some words of wisdom to highlight how your company can avoid the negative PR in social media.
5. 4 Musts for Serious Customer Success in 2015
According to Garnter, 80% of a company’s future profits only come from 20% of existing customers due to poor customer service experience. Bob Marsh’s article outlines the findings from LevelEleven which tested their customer service success strategy, and presents four ways to receive stronger feedback from customers. It all comes down to investing time and effort into the customer’s experience.
6. Building Customer Relationships – What You Need to Know
(December 31, 2014 – Still counts, right?) This articles talks about those critical moments in building customer relationships. We know that customer relationships are fragile but they’re worth it. Through communication, understating complaints, and building trust with the customer, the relationship with the client will be stronger than ever. This article can help you communicate more effectively, learn more about your customer and even live for customer complaints.
7. Why Customer Service is More Important than You Think
In order to have a successful business, you need to combine several things, such as finding your strong points over your competitors, lower your price, improving your marketing and finally the most dominant thing, customer service. In this article, by Shai, you can find three main reasons why organizations should focus on improving the customer experience.
8. The Danger of the 80/20 Service Level Continues
Call center service has a metric called “service level”. This metric is defined as a pair of numbers: a percentage value and a time value in seconds. So, for example, an “80/20″ service level means 80% of calls answered in 20 seconds which is considered to be standard in the industry, but is really just a common misconception. In this article, Shai explains the danger of service level, and how to use the Erlang equations in order to properly model the service level in your call center.
9. The Difference Between Customer Service and Customer Success
The customer service department resolves problems and answers questions whenever customers have problems with the products. The customer success department, however, works with customers to ensure success and avoid problems before the customer even know an issue might exist. In this article, Shep Hyken tells us the difference between the departments and gives us some examples to make it clearer.
10. Get the Most Out of Your Canned Messages
In this article, Kevin Gao helps us understand the limits and the possibilities of canned/scripted messages. We know they’re not the very best we can offer, but they are often necessary. Gao helps define the good and the bad in scripted messages in order to bring forth the best in canned customer service.
11. Customer’s Desire for Speed, Convenience Fuels Greater Demand for Self-Service
Tricia Morris’ article outlines some of the reasons behind a growing need for the speed and convenience of self-service. Using some key findings from a white paper on self-service, she provides some interesting statistics on the kinds of changes the customers require in order to get the most out of your self-service options. For instance, that self-service channel usage has increased from 67% in 2012 to 76% in 2014, while phone usage remains the same at 73%.
12. Website Experience Mistakes That Destroy Customer Service
A website is an excellent way to deliver services online, but it can easily become one of the most frustrating elements of customer care. Website is a key cog in the overall customer experience journey process. Therefore, a website needs to be user-friendly. In this excellent article, by Flavio Martin, you can learn the common web mistakes that often distance customers from your business.
13. 4 Customer Service Bad Habits to Banish Today
Customer support is not an easy job. As support people, we often follow a customer support habits that are actually detrimental to companies, customers, and support team morale. In this article, Heather McCloske gives us four examples of the worst habits in the customer service team, and how to help your team ditch them for good.
14. 5 Surprising Studies in What People Consider “Good” Customer Service
Every business knows that empathy, appreciation and helpfulness are the key to successful customer service, but is it enough? If it was, customer service wouldn’t be such a major subject to discussion.
In this article, the writer Len Markidan gives us five surprising data points on what people really expect of “good” customer service. This data will help you better understand customer expectations, and how to fulfill them.
15. Do Your Customer Service Policies Show You Trust Your Employees? 5 Strategies to Consider
In a lot of businesses, front-line employees have to get a manager’s approval for even the simplest, low-dollar merchandise return. This fact will influence your customers, whether they choose your business or your competitors. They know that if they want to return their latest purchase, they will have to answer a lot of questions and the customer care representatives can’t give them an answer without getting the manager involved. Randy Conley gives us five strategies that demonstrate trust in your employees and customers.
16. 25 Statistics on the Power of Positive Customer Service
Do you know the power of positive customer service? What your company need to do in order to deliver great customer service? Did you know that while over 80% of companies boast that they provide “superior” customer service, only 8% of customers actually agree with them? In this article, Gigi Piccolo gives us 25 statistics on the power of positive customer service. You can learn what service is considered good customer service, especially what happens when companies aren’t providing it.
17. Pleased to Beat You: Customer Service Needs Better Rivalries
“Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game” (Dr. Tony Alessandra). Did you ever think about the power of competition? Rivalries bring out the best from the teams, so why not using that in customer service teams? The author of this article, Tricia Morris, presents us parts of a report that discusses how brands need to sharp their competitive edge.
18. How to Get Your Team to Act on Customer Feedback
Many times, customer service teams tend to ignore customer feedback, especially online, which can be critical for customer retention. In this article, Len Markidan providies us with 4 easy-to-grasp tips on how to get your customer service teams to act on customer feedback, before it’s too late. For instance, he recommends on doing a weekly team talk, where everyone share problems and feedback from customers, talk about it and try to find solutions.
19. 5 Things Washing Dishes in My Family Restaurant Taught Me About Customer Service
Plenty has been said about the “ideal customer service.” Basically, this usually entails treating all customers in a similar manner, recognizing that the customer is always right, and handling customer satisfaction as a team. In this article, Paul Vaccaro goes over the 5 most important things every customer service provider needs to know about and act on, following his experiences as a dishwasher at his family’s restaurant.
