Whether you are a start-up company, regional SME or global corporation, chances are how you and your staff provide great service to your own customers is a process that has been carefully honed and refined. The customer care you provide should after all be your biggest USP as a brand, especially as super savvy consumers expect more from the companies they spend their hard earned cash with. Nowadays you have more versatility than ever to deliver the very best customer care, but social media channels and live chat tools aside, content as customer service is becoming more important. In recent years, content marketing has become integral to the online profiles of organisations of all sizes and niches. Now, with the right strategy, you can use good content to engage, inform and even inspire your customer base, regardless of whether your aim is to attract new customers, retain existing ones or both.
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How to Get Your Customer Service Employees to Care About Customers (Infographic)
The way your employees feel is the way your customers will feel. And if your employees don’t feel valued, neither will your customers. – Sybil F. Stershic Companies like Zappos, Southwest Airlines and Ritz-Carlton Hotels have one thing in common – they are worldwide famous for providing excellent customer service and having friendly employees. Their employees are obviously passionate about their work and are willing to go the extra mile to help customers. “Employee engagement is the emotional commitment the employee has to the organization and its goals. This emotional commitment means engaged employees actually care about their work and their company. They don’t work just for a paycheck, or just for the next promotion, but work on behalf of the organization’s goals.” – Kevin Kruse – NY Times Bestselling Author, Keynote Speaker When employees are engaged, they truly care about customers, deliver better service and brand advocacy, and they are less likely to leave their jobs. While organizations enjoy better employee productivity and increased revenue:
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10 ‘Must-have’ Skills for Being Awesome at Customer Service
When it comes to providing outstanding customer service, it’s the people who make all the difference. While it certainly takes time, training, practice and dedication to become a rockstar in customer service, it doesn’t have to be that hard when you know where exactly to focus your efforts on. Here’s the list of 10 must-have soft skills that matter most and that everyone involved in customer service should master and use in their daily interactions with customers. # 1 Effective Listening Listening is the key to effective communication. Without the ability to listen carefully to what a customer is saying, a message could be easily misunderstood and misinterpreted. As a result, communication breaks down leaving a customer frustrated. Listening isn’t just about hearing. A good listener will not only listen to what is being said, but also what is left unsaid or partially said. Luckily, if your listening skills are weak, there are certain techniques for improving them.
Continue reading10 Signs of a Company That Really Cares About Customers
Did you know that there’s such a thing as International Clients’ Day? Although I’ve been in customer service for more than a decade, I first learned of it last week through a special offer email that I got in my inbox. Did you happen to hear about it too? Whether or not, the fact is that this informal holiday has not been around for that long. Actually, it was proposed (and celebrated for the first time) by Lithuanian and Russian businessmen on March 19, 2010 as an opportunity to show gratitude to their customers. Since then, the occasion has been supported by many organizations and businesses in Western Europe, and it’s constantly expanding, with more companies joining the initiative year by year. Would you join the club too?
Continue reading15 Reasons Your Customers Don’t Like You (Infographic)
The key to any business success is building trust and establishing strong relationships with customers as those are the main factors that contribute to customer loyalty and generate more sales. Very often though, we unknowingly create barriers that discourage customers from doing business with us, sometimes simply because we don’t realize they exist. Assuming that your products or services are absolutely great, do you know what can drive your customers away and prevent you from building long-lasting relationships with them?
Continue reading6 Tips to Build Stronger Customer Trust with Live Chat Support
Many online companies add live chat support to their websites as a means to offer quick and efficient customer service and increase customer engagement. Not many though recognize the value of live chat in creating customer trust. Perhaps only few website owners question themselves, how adding live chat support can help them build greater trust with clients. At the same time, most of us are aware of the damaging effect that this tool can cause to company’s reputation and customers’ trust when it is being left unattended or mismanaged. Most of us at least once faced a situation when we were hopelessly trying to contact live chat support of a certain company and we either were made to wait for too long, or our call was ignored, or advertised 24/7 support stayed offline for days and weeks. This experience of course did not fail to shake our trust in the company’s credibility and responsibility before their customers.
Continue readingAre Your Customers Happy? Rethink Your Customer Service Strategy for 2015
An effective customer service strategy is vital for building and growing a successful business, no matter the size or industry. If you’re planning a quicker growth and bigger profits for your business in 2015, it’s time to start rethinking your customer service strategy to get a jump on your competitors. What exactly can you do to make it better? Here are 6 steps to building a winning customer service strategy: 1. Make Outstanding Customer Service a Priority How do you really think of customer service? If it’s just about getting things fixed when something goes wrong – it’s an after the fact, reactive attitude. Thinking this way might be harmful for your business. A proactive attitude is seeing customer service as a total experience, a process of engaging with prospects before and after they become your customers. When done right, customer service becomes your positive, long-term reputation. Make it a priority and ensure that everyone in your organization shares this vision and lives up to it consistently.
Continue readingWhy Do Businesses Still Provide Terrible Customer Service?
As most business owners already know, it’s all too easy to lose valuable customers in today’s competitive, accelerated, consumer-powered marketplace. And providing terrible customer service is one of the fastest ways to make it happen. So why do we still see so many examples of companies offering awful customer service? There might be 6 major reasons for that: Failing to realize the cost of bad customer service Some businesses simply fail to realize and acknowledge the importance of customer service and, particularly, the financial impact of poor customer service on their organizations. Here’s some curious statistics to get you rethinking your customer service strategy:
Continue readingCustomer Service Phrases That Make a Difference
Whether you talk to your customers face-to-face, over the phone or in live support chat online, what you say and how you say it matters a lot to your business. Believe it or not, the right language is truly important in Customer Service. Certain words and phrases can either make or break the whole impression and the way a customer is left to feel after the conversation. Here’s my personal list of the most powerful phrases in Customer Service that I believe can make a difference to a company’s relationships with its customers:
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