Kelly is new to the town and visits a departmental store for her monthly grocery shopping. She browses all the available products and finds nothing interesting about the store or its offerings. Eventually, she ends up buying nothing.
While walking down the street she comes across a store where the store manager welcomes her with a pleasant smile on his face. Kelly finds the store intriguing as each and every aspect of the store seemed welcoming. She was able to find each of her required grocery items with a suitable discount or a catchy offer. Kelly’s day was not bad after all.
What was so attractive about the second store? What drove Kelly to purchase?
With plenty of options available, the smart customers of the new generation aka Millennials, seek more satisfaction. When customers have high expectations and the reality turns out to be a terrifying journey, they get disappointed and rate their experience as nowhere near satisfying. Studies show that – 80% of companies believe they are providing superior customer service, while only 8% of their customers agree with them.
With increased competition in the market, great customer service is not the order of the day. Organizations tend to retain its customers by providing extraordinary services, and at the same time customers dominate every cycle in their buying journey. One mistake by brands, and the customer can surely defect to competition. Therefore, it has become a necessity to implement a fair rule to the game of winning brand advocates. Whatever and however the situation is, your customers should always be your greatest asset.
So how will you ensure your that you exceed expectations of your customers on a regular basis?
Let us discuss few ways in which organizations can exceed customer expectations to convert them into brand advocates:
- Understand your Customer’s Requirement: In order to provide exceptional service to customers, brands need to study the behaviour of segmented buyers. As a first step, you can begin by asking questions. Feedback can be one of the appropriate ways to understand the ongoing demand of your customers. Different set of customers will have different requirements. Therefore, the customer service department needs to study the buyer’s journey with the help of a customer engagement technology. The agents can analyze the text and speech interaction of the buyers captured through the customer engagement technology. Based on the captured data, brands can work on their customer service strategies for creating seamless experience.
- Track your Customer Touchpoints: Keeping track and optimizing customer touchpoint is essential for brands to create consistent and predictable customer service. Every single mistake on touchpoints like off-target advertising or a website with poor branding can drag your customers away from your brand. It is advisable for organizations to break out their customer’s journey into different steps. We have listed down few touchpoint categories that your organizations can build for their operations:
Segmenting touchpoints into various categories can be beneficial to organizations in many ways. For instance, organizations can locate their potential areas of customer dissatisfaction to improve the overall satisfaction level of its customers.
- Build Connect with your Prospective Buyers: After mapping the customer’s journey, organizations can make their way forward by building bonds with their prospective customers. Over 50% of customers experience are based exclusively on emotions. Emotions shape the attitudes that drive buying decisions. Take the example of Kelly’s story mentioned initially. She was comfortable purchasing groceries from the second store due to the amazing welcome and unique offers presented by the store. It is not always enough to create a successful product. The most successful organizations have given a personal touch to the buyer’s journey along with creating great products.
- Work on the Satisfaction Level During Calls: Customer frustration increases each time they make a call to the service department. Organizations with the help of a customer engagement platform can improve the satisfaction level of customers by routing them to an agent they have interacted with earlier, every time they call. This reduces the gap as the customer call pertaining to the same subject does not have to be explained to the agent each time the call gets connected. Also, this would provide organizations with the opportunity to identify their high-proposition customers. These set of customers can be handed over to a dedicated team consisting of experienced professionals.
- Be more Proactive: The new generation customers seek for more active approach from the customer service department. Stiff competition in the market has made it mandatory for service agents to provide immediate response to customer queries, whether it is through chat, email or social media. Proactive customer service as an approach has gained considerable traction in recent times. Through this approach, businesses can take initiatives to create customer experiences that yield great results. Organizations should try to differentiate themselves from the crowd by taking a proactive step in resolving or detecting problems, even before customers complains about the problems.
- Create an Impact: Providing quality customer service should not only be considered as a responsibility but also an opportunity. Often, the customer service department is considered as a profit center, but this is totally wrong. The service departments are the heart of organizations as they keep customers glued to your brand for a long time. Good customer service provides a golden opportunity for brands to create extra impact to generate more quality referrals. So, how can brands give a personal touch to the customer’s journey?
Here are few ways in which organizations can go an extra mile for providing an extraordinary customer service:
- Agents can provide extra attention to the things that might seem unimportant but actually can be a great way to delight customers. Service departments should adopt a habit of returning phone calls and emails with consistent follow-ups, to ensure that they don’t miss out on an opportunity to create a wonderful impact.
- Brands can delight their customers by providing them with surprise or promotional gifts and discounts.
- Contact center agents should always stay ready for providing immediate redressal and should also be open to feedbacks.
- Brands can also make an extra effort by over-delivering of what they have actually promised. This will help them in winning customers trust with a good word of mouth.
Let us know in the comment section below how you currently deliver service and exceed your customer expectations.