Hey Cora - Providing great customer service can be such a powerful competitive advantage (and disadvantage if you do it wrong, something I’ll also show you).
The great thing is, there are a few really simple principles that you can start following today to deliver AWESOME customer service. (For those looking for a more comprehensive guide, check out our customer service best practices post that we recently wrote).
5 Ways to Deliver Great Customer Service
1. Provide Instant Answers to Instantly Increase Customer Happiness
There’s nothing better than knowing that someone cares about you. If you call your mother for help, she’ll come instantly, and help you. You know you can rely on her. With customer service and support, it’s really similar.
The faster you respond, with a helpful and accurate answer, the more the customer(s) will love you.
Just check out the following research from HubSpot which shows that 93% of customers are likely to come back to make future purchases from companies that provide outstanding customer service.
So treat your customers like precious diamonds! This will result in MORE SALES, HAPPIER CUSTOMERS, and turn your company in an unstoppable force.
In fact, applying this principle has really helped us at Helpjuice. We’ll call customers instantly after they sign up, to see if there’s anything we can do for them, or help them with.
We’re huge fans of this philosophy, in fact, we built a company around giving customers instant answers.
2. Don’t Be Rude (Under Any Circumstances)
Okay, so you could argue whether the support operator in the above-image is rude or not, but they certainly weren’t helpful.
I can think of countless examples of really rude customer service reps that I’ve seen (and experienced). There’s nothing worse than a rude customer service agent.
People WILL switch to your competitor because of this. It’s the reason WHY so many companies are stepping up how they provide customer service.
Customers have many channels and will speak up about your company. You don’t want customers reading horrible stuff about you on twitter, right?
You need to really care.
3. Don’t Make Customers Feel Stupid
The customer is the single most important thing for businesses. You build around them, you charge them, and you support them.
They’re the ones that support you also.
You wouldn’t tell a loved one that you didn’t have time to take 5 minutes off for them, would you? Especially not if they could tweet about you, right?
I had an unfortunate experience with a company that handles error notifications, in a really cool way.
I had to downgrade as we wanted to pay $5/month instead of $15, and ended up asking to downgrade for free, although, I could have been persuaded to still pay the $5/mo plan, I wasn’t.
I think their software is great, but, unfortunately, the support I received made me think of them as someone who didn’t really value me as much.
If there were an option, I would have probably gone with their competitor because of this.
4. Follow Up to Make Sure That the Customer's Issues Were Resolved
Don’t you, as a customer, just love it when the customer support agent is so nice with you, and double checks that you’re fine and that the issue was resolved, a couple days after?
It really gives out the tone that they TRUELY do value your time and aren’t just saying it in your automated telephone system.
Our rule of thing is to use the phone. We’ll call the customer once they’re signed up with us, and if they have any questions via e-mail, we’ll respond to them and then call them.
This often results in a much better relationship with our customers, and hence they’re more than glad to pay and tell their friends how much they love Helpjuice.
The most important thing is to make sure you actually follow up and give a shit about your customers.
5. Put Effort Into Your Responses - Even Those That Seemingly Require Minimum Effort
Let’s examine the two conversations below and determine which of the two will result in more trust established with the customer, higher likelihood of the customer buying and higher customer satisfaction.
Conversation 1
Jason: “Hi, how much does Helpjuice cost?”
Helpjuice support: “Hi there, Jason. Helpjuice is a monthly subscription service that companies pay for between $50 and $150/month; They are all differentiated on a number of different things: page views, number of end-users we’ve helped, whether you’d like our advanced or basic analytics and also, whether you’d want us to support domain mapping or not.
If you’d like, we could discuss what makes sense; My direct phone number is 904-419-3645, I’m available 24/7, don’t hesitate to call.
However, we also do offer custom-tailored accounts in case you exceed the pricing.
To see more about our pricing, we have a page with the details right here: helpjuice.com/pricing/
Please let me know if this makes any sense”
Conversation 2
Jason: “Hi, how much does helpjuice cost?”
Helpjuice support: “Thanks for contacting us; You can see more about our pricing here: helpjuice.com/pricing/”
If you had to guess which one of these actually converts more sales, has a higher response rate, and much higher likelihood of the customer buying, what would you say? (hint: it’s conversation #1)
While we don’t get these exact emails (Helpjuice is great for these kinds of questions), this is just a simple example to get the point across.
Have you had similar experiences, or have a set of rules in YOUR COMPANY? I WANT to hear more! Post it in the comments below
P.S: Don’t forget to check out Helpjuice.com, we’re serious about slicing your support inbox by half and helping you deliver WORLD-CLASS service and support to your customers.
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