The Real Cost of Losing Customers due to Poor Customer Service (Infographic)

The cost of losing customers differs wildly between businesses, but it gets even higher if a customer is lost due to poor customer service experiences. No doubt, customer service has a long-term impact on buying decisions, with customers continuing to avoid companies years after the initial negative interaction.

But what’s more, social media and online review websites enable bad service stories to be shared not only with family, friends or colleagues, but also with the general public affecting other potential customers. Which definitely means future lost sales for businesses, because:

  • 95% of customers share bad experiences with others, 54% share bad experiences with 5+ people, 45% share negative reviews on social media;
  • 63% of consumers read negative reviews on social media;
  • 88% of customers trust online reviews as much as they trust friends;
  • A single negative online review can cost the average business an average loss of 30 customers.

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Top 10 Customer Service KPIs: How to Evaluate Your Live Chat Team Performance

Top 10 Customer Service KPIs
Customer Service KPIs for Live Chat Teams

Customer service representatives play a key role in business growth and promotion – by supporting customers they build trust and improve brand awareness, reduce the number of complaints and facilitate your marketing efforts. More than that, they often are the only contact a customer has with a company. If your business is in need of creating or growing a customer service team, there should be a process of evaluating its performance to make the team successful. >>>

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4 Key Personality Traits for A Perfect Customer Service Representative

Key Personality Traits for A Perfect Service Rep
Key Personality Traits for A Perfect Service Rep

Providing outstanding customer service naturally starts from finding and hiring the right employees for your customer support team. While perfection can hardly ever be achieved – some people just happen to possess the qualities that make them more suited for the role of a customer service representative, while others simply don’t. Before we jump into exploring what makes a fantastic customer service employee, here are the key questions you should ask before hunting for a perfect support agent:

  1. What is the ideal support personality for YOUR company culture?
  2. What hard skills are absolutely necessary for the job?
  3. What soft skills are ‘must-have’ and desirable to have?
  4. What exactly will the agent be responsible for?

Having those questions answered in detail will give you a better understanding of what you should be looking for in your ideal candidate. But beyond that, there are certain characteristics and qualities that set excellent customer service employees apart. >>>

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How to Write a New Customer Welcome Letter

welcome letter
How to write a welcome letter

New customer welcome letters have been utilized by many businesses that hold customer relations in high regard. It is considered as good customer relations, and it enhances personal relationships between business and their customers. Writing new customer welcome letters promotes friendly exchanges with the customer, and it sets the tone for subsequent communications with the customer. It also fosters customer engagement. When a business writes this letter, it manages the customer’s expectations and introduces them to what the business is going to offer in terms of products and services. All pertinent information that relates to the core business of the company is disclosed. >>>

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Customer Service Cheat Sheet for Live Chat Operators with Examples of Responses

Cheat Sheet for Live Chat Operators
Cheat Sheet for Live Chat Operators

Chat etiquette plays a huge role in customer service. Professional and authentic interaction with clients goes far beyond the opportunity to make a sale. It helps to build a lasting relationship with the customer, inspire future communication and create fans and advocates of your brand.

How to treat the customer to be able to appreciate all these benefits and escalate your service to a more professional and human level?

Customer service training is the most important part in achieving these goals.

Professional line of communication is not that obvious to expect your service agents to get at it intuitively. It is especially true with new employees who often need help finding the proper style of communication which would stick with your business objectives and allow them to maintain their authenticity.

Below are some guidelines on how a service agent can best handle the major key points in a live chat conversation. >>>

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FAQ Page for Customer Self Service: How to Choose the Questions to Cover

FAQ page for self service
FAQ page for self service

More and more customers take an advantage of self service options before contacting customer support representatives. In fact, Gartner reports that improving the self-service experience of consumers is among the top 3 priorities for companies that aim to improve customer experience and service. According to Zendesk 50% of customers think it’s important to solve product or service issues themselves. By creating a page for customer self service with most frequently asked questions and answers to them you will not only empower your online shoppers to find information they need in your support portal, but will also cut down on customer service costs. Here are the most important benefits of a FAQ page:

  • Assist your customers proactively by anticipating their needs before they have to ask for help
  • Cut down on customer service costs and save time of your customer service team
  • Offer your customers a portal where they can find not only answers to their questions but also read more about your company
  • Your FAQ page can be a valuable SEO and PPC asset
  • Educate your customers on the topic related to your business

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Social Media Customer Service Stats and Trends You Need to Know (Infographic)

With over 2 billion Facebook users, +700 million Instagram users, and +300 million Twitter users, it’s no longer enough for brands to be merely present on social media. They need to be active and engaging. Today’s customers want their voices heard and problems resolved quickly and effortlessly whenever they reach out to brands on social media. And if brands are not part of the conversation – they will be left behind.

Obviously, it’s no longer a question if your business should listen to customers on social media – it’s a question of how you listen and, what’s even more important, how you respond. By delivering great customer support on social media, you can truly build stronger relationships with customers and improve customer loyalty. In fact, according to Aberdeen, companies that have a well-crafted social customer service approach experience 92% customer retention. >>>

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How to Get the Most out of Google Analytics and Live Chat Integration

Google Analytics and Live Chat Integration – Plan, Measure, Evaluate, Improve

Success of business promotion is based on planning, measurement, evaluation and improvement. To be effective on every of these stages a marketing department should know the objectives of the business and how to apply them into analytical tools.

Live chat software often plays a key role in converting a visitor to a consumer. Customer service departments put much effort to succeed via the live chat. If you invest into a powerful live chat solution, make sure to plan, measure, evaluate and improve its performance to help your customer service team to be even more effective. >>>

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10 Questions to Ask When Collecting Customer Data

Collecting customer data
Tips for collecting customer data

Customers are putting a great deal of faith in you, when they’re telling you personal information. It’s essential that you understand the gravity of this relationship and the level of trust a customer is instilling in you when they disclose these things to you.

Spamming them, selling their information to another company or letting it fall prey to a cyber attack are all situations where the trust given to you will immediately be shattered. Keep their information safe and secure, and take seriously the trust they have given you.

Here are the top 10 questions you should be asking before you start asking your customers to collect their personal information. >>>

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A Complete Guide To Using Canned Responses in Live Chat

Canned responses
Canned responses guide

Predefined, canned or saved responses in some cases help to facilitate and enhance live chat communication. However, live chat agents should keep in mind that misusing this feature may lead to their chat sessions sound robotic and unfriendly. All bread is not baked in one oven. The same should be applied to live chat canned responses for your company’s customer service. They should be unique and adjusted to your business needs.

Though, it seems quite clear what kind of responses to add, I would like to describe some scenarios which will help you to create canned responses for your live chat.

Greeting your customer

Most live chat providers offer an ability to customize system messages, which appear automatically when the chat is initiated. Definitely, adding valuable for your customers information to such messages will save your team’s time and will give your customers clear directions what to do further. You can include some basic instructions, greet your customers or just thank them for contacting your support chat. Here are a couple of examples of such messages: >>>

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