Top 5 Strategies to Improve Your Customer Experience

With shrinking human attention and competitive market, what can your brand do to increase customer engagement and drive satisfaction and loyalty? Improve customer service is the obvious, which is also often overlooked. Interactions with your brand is a defining and most memorable moment for customers. At the root of customer service is your customer service team. Their skills and quality of the service they provide define your customers’ experiences.

Established brands must have customer relationships already established, but a smart business will always be seeking to improve customer service and asking “How do we improve our customer service?” Great customer service is anchored on active listening, engagement and anticipating your customers’ needs and desires. If your brand is not constantly on the lookout for opportunities to improve how you serve your customers, then customer experiences will stagnate. Here are some helpful customer service tips to improve customer experiences:

Strengthen Customer Service Skills

It’s crucial that your front of house or customer service team has the right skills for engaging customer and managing their needs. No matter how good your CRM software is, it will not compensate for lack of customer service skills. But what specific skills should your customer service have in this era of connectivity and in-the-moment engagement?

• Empathy – Probably one of the most important customer service skills is the ability to understand and connect with your customer’s feelings. This allows you to affirm a customer’s feelings and indicate that you understand and can relate with their frustration, even if sometimes you cannot fix it because it’s out of your hands.
• Patience – Being patient is especially helpful when dealing with irate or angry customers. This helps you to understand the customers’ concerns or issues and be instrumental in improving the company’s customer service.
• Consistency – Every customer is unique. There are some who have endless questions, while some will be irate. Some customers can be chatty and there are those who just quietly come and go. Your team must know how to handle all types of customers and be able to provide consistent level of service.
• Adaptability – You should be able to handle surprises, sense the customer’s mindset or mood and be able to quickly adapt.
• ­­­Communication – Clearly convey to customers exactly what you mean, leaving to room for miscommunication.  Speak clearly and effectively so customers don’t walk away confused. Be authentic, stay upbeat and use positive language, and always end a conversation with assurance that the customer is satisfied with their experience and your services.
• Knowledge – Even though they’re most likely going to Google everything about your service or product, customers will still rely on you for additional information. Ensure your information is up to date so you can answer very detailed or technical questions. But, at the same time, don’t hesitate to admit you don’t know some of the things because customers will appreciate your honesty and the efforts you put in to find the right answer for them.

Assess Every Touchpoint

Negative customer experiences at any point in the lifecycle can ruin relationships that your business worked hard to win and build. Pay close attention to key touchpoints, without losing sight of the entire customer experience, or you risk failure to deliver good service that can really hurt your brand.

Improve Customer Engagement

Having the necessary skill set is a good start. Your team still needs to engage with your customers. To humanize relationship with your customers, find a common ground or shared interests with them. This endears your customers to your brand and makes any conflicts easier to overcome. Get help from Glowing Customer Engagement Cloud to centralize multiple interactions with customers and manage relationship through mobile messaging from a single platform. This will drive better outcomes for customers throughout their interactions with your brand.

Proactively Seek Customer Feedback

No matter how well-trained and highly-skilled your customer service team is, you will always struggle to get in front of every customer issue. This is why it’s important to create an easy way for your customers to provide feedback. Whether it’s a phone survey at the end of a service call, an email survey sent from your CRM, a form on your website, or a mobile message survey sent through your Glowing Customer Engagement Cloud dashboard, providing multiple access for customer feedback will make it easier for your brand to assess what needs improvement in service delivery. This can also keep unhappy customers from voicing their dissatisfaction on highly-visible review sites or social media.

Invest in Software or Technology

In this day and age of connectivity and mobility, software or technology plays an important role in customer service as it helps  increase the speed of customer interactions. With the right tools or solutions, customers no longer have to wait on hold on the phone to speak with customer service agent. Instead, live chat on company websites or in-the-moment text or messaging through popular messaging platforms enables brands to engage with customers and address their needs. With Glowing Customer Engagement Cloud, you can use broadcast message feature to send messages to a large group at once, automate responses to frequently asked questions, schedule your messages and more.

Unsure of your team’s strengths and weaknesses are or why customer engagement is dipping? Contact Glowing at 650) 687-7046 and we’ll empower your business and team to engage with your customers through text and messaging. With our enterprise-class and cloud-based messaging solutions, you will discover touchpoints and skills that need improvement, and, more importantly, your customers will see your brand’s commitment to providing top-notch customer service.