Foolproof Tips to Provide Stand-Out Customer Service

Can you win customers if you provide the same old customer care or service? Probably not; a reason why you need to move from customer service and think about delivering customer experience. So, what are the differences between customer service and customer experience? Let's delve in to understand the similarities and differences between customer service and customer experience to make informed decisions.

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The Similarities and Differences Between Customer Service and Customer Experience

In essence, both customer service and customer experience begin with customer care. The primary objective of both is to provide solutions to customer queries and collaborate with them to turn them into loyal customers. However, while customer service focuses mainly on human interactions and supports customers, customer experience refers to the overall process of monitoring the customer's journey during their association with a business.

To provide flawless customer service, the customer support team must possess certain unique traits like patience, empathy, promptness, politeness, product knowledge, software knowledge, and the tenacity to attend to intellectual and not-so-wise queries of customers and provide time-tested solutions. A customer senses the organization's nature by listening to the executive's voice. Hence, customer service is an organized way to make an organization's services more accessible and relatable to customers.

Customer Experience, a.k.a CX, includes everything the customer does with the goods or services after becoming a customer. While customer service provides solutions to the customers' current queries, CX keeps track of all communication and interactions between your organization and the customer from the beginning of the relationship.

Customer experience is more inclusive and expansive than customer service. It analyses how a customer uses your products or services or how they use the automated support options. It also records their experience of using your online or offline facilities and how they interacted with the customer support team. Generally, customer experience contains the following three broad aspects:

• Customer Service - All direct and indirect interactions between a customer and the customer care team are known as customer service. Not only customer support but self-service support also comes under customer service.
• The Technology Behind the Goods and Services - This is how the customer understands and relates to the technology behind goods and services. This is mainly achieved by seeking customer reviews on product usage.
• The Interface - The interface refers to the brand's touchpoint or how the customer perceives the product design, marketing, and customer support. This is primarily achieved by reading the customer reviews and identifying how the brand has addressed their pain points.

Hence, customer experience refers to the broad experience of the customer through their association with the brand's products and services. While customer service only records the interactions between customers and business, customer experience involves analyzing the customers' data from all quarters and identifying a pattern to improve the company's processes.

So, after all this discussion, you must be asking yourself - which should I choose - customer service or customer experience? The answer is clear as water - customer experience. However, upgrading your customer service with customer experience might be a costly endeavor, prompting many businesses to redesign their customer service to provide optimal support to consumers and rev up their customer interactions.

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Why You Should Redesign Your Customer Service Mechanisms - The Top Benefits

Here are the top advantages of revamping your customer support system.

1. Better Customer Retention

It's a fact that when customers are happy with the resolution provided by the customer service team, they will speak well about you. However, the customer care team cannot work on its own. It needs proper coordination with all departments. The customer support team simply conveys the stance adopted by other teams like marketing, production, manufacturing, accounts, HR, and the likes. Hence, when all departments in an organization work as a whole, the customer support team becomes strong, and a strong customer support team prompts customers to stay loyal.

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2. More Publicity

Good customer support is linked to more publicity. When your customers are happy with your service quality, they become your brand ambassadors. And, unlike social media influencers, you don't have to pay your customers anything to speak nicely about you. Hence, a trained, compassionate customer care team can work wonders for your marketing efforts.

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3. More Profits

Companies generally spend a considerable chunk of their working capital on advertisements and brand promotions. However, when your customer service is world-class, your customers speak highly about your brand. Thus, your company gets more customers at a fraction of the cost you would otherwise incur to promote your brand. As more customers purchase your goods and services, your profit margin is bound to rise.

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4. Boosts Employees' Morale

When customers appreciate your brand, your employees feel happy. The more empowered your employees feel, the better they participate in the company's growth story. Hence, a robust customer support mechanism can increase the overall satisfaction level of your employees, promoting them to give more to the company.

Which are the Best Ways to Improve Your Customer Service System?

The following are the top ways to improve your customer support mechanism:

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5. Know Your Customers' Needs

Identifying your customers' needs is the bare minimum you can do to provide impactful customer service. It is vital to deploy strategies to understand your customers' needs without asking too many questions. Scour for the information available about the client with different departments like sales, marketing, finance, and customer support to lay out a pattern. You can also send the customer a survey link to understand them better.

After determining the customers' needs, you need to find a way to store the information. From a simple tool like Microsoft Excel to more complex Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools, you may need many things to store customer data. Whatever you do, ensure that the data remains available with you for long because losing the data means following the same process all over again.

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6. Ask For Reviews and Share Them With the Customer Support Team

Transparency often does what training cannot. Your customer care team may naturally learn critical things by looking at customer reviews. So, it's necessary to share the reviews you get from customers with the customer care team.

But, the question is, how can you get more customer reviews? Here are the top ways:

• Testimonials: Request your customers to write a review on the product they have purchased and used.
• Online Reviews: Harness the power of online media to let your customers give online reviews.
• On-call Feedback: Ask customer care to call customers and seek their feedback individually.
• Feedback Form: You may create an online survey form with multiple-choice questions to allow customers to provide their feedback. A short survey receives more responses than long ones.

Customer reviews can give you an insight into your customers' happiness levels. You can use this knowledge to streamline your customer service and achieve remarkable growth.

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7. Lay Down The Service Standards

Even before setting out on the mission to make your customer service world-class, you must lay the groundwork to set service standards. The service standards put all customer care agents on the same track and help you create a strong customer support model.

Your service standards may include the following things:

• Tonality: Let your agents know the tonality you prefer. For example, if you sell kids' toys, it's best to maintain a quirky, fun tone while communicating with customers. In contrast, a hospital may win accolades by maintaining a neutral, compassionate tone.
• The Contact Point: Setting the contact point or communication medium is important. For example, if your customer prefers a phone call over email, it's wise to call them over the phone whenever the need arises.
• Levels: The customer care team must know the hierarchy well. For instance, if a customer needs higher-level assistance, the customer support executive must know to whom to transfer the call.
• Timescale: Setting clear timelines is crucial for achieving optimal impact. Set timelines like "Receive a telephone call within three rings."

When the customer service team knows your standards well, they work well together. And when customers talk to such a well-organized customer support division, they're bound to have good things to say about your company.

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8. Exceed Your Customers' Expectations

Try to give something extra than the resolution your customer asked for. Top brands employ this technique to win over customers. You can either upsell them something by offering predatory discounts or follow up to see whether their issue has been resolved or not.

When your customers get something extra than they asked for, they become your loyal ambassadors. For example, your customers may like it if you remember their birthdays or anniversaries.

The idea is to give your customers a reason to remember you because the more they remember you, the better the chances of referral will be.

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Personalization Holds the Key to World-Class Customer Service

Providing top-class customer service is essential to surviving in the modern day. In addition, personalization is an integral aspect of high-quality customer service.

Glood.ai lets you streamline your customer support processes by introducing you to the time-tested benefits of personalized service. From onsite personalization to personalized marketing, Glood.ai enables you to move from customer service to customer experience.