9 Best Practices to Improve Customer Support

Customer support plays a key role in improving your business. Today, it is not enough to provide customer satisfaction alone. Building customer loyalty is essential too. Walker suggests that the customer experience is set to take center stage over price and product by 2020. Thus, it is essential to invest ample time to hire high-quality customer support agents.

Statistics show that prospects look for better customer service for the product. 54% of people in the US refused to work with businesses offering poor customer support service. Alternatively, 81% of people agree to pay more for an excellent customer service experience.

It’s a high priority for businesses to implement an effective customer support strategy to keep customers happy. Below we’ll shed some light on leveraging best practices to improve customer support across every service channel.

Best Practices to Improve the Quality of Customer Support

Below are the key practices which you can use to improve your customer support. Implement these practices to provide excellent customer service experience.

Carefully listen to what customer’s need and then react

Customers always want you to hear and listen to their needs. Taking note of customer needs comes in handy while responding to unhappy customers. You can tell the customer that you are actively listening to and understanding the problem while focusing on the root cause. You can ask additional questions to identify the problem and provide a resolution.

Strategize and follow customer service standards

For better productivity, it is better to go with a standard strategy. Build an effective strategy for customer support and familiarize your customer support executives with it.

Developing a clear strategy also enables you to pave a roadmap for support reps to offer high-quality service. Similarly, It will also be helpful to produce training programs for support reps that are hired in the future.

Note, It is necessary to have concise, specific and measurable customer service standards aligned with customer requirements.

Maintain a fresh attitude

No matter how long your support reps have been working, keeping a positive attitude is essential to success. Note, the customer is coming to your support team for help. Support reps need to be positive in providing a solution to fully resolve that customer’s problems.

Your approach towards providing better customer service should always be fresh, positive and helpful.

Manage customer expectations correctly

Let’s face it, customers have high expectations for your business. However, this does not mean that you promise them everything, as you simply won’t be able to deliver it. Instead, why not focus on communicating with your customers about what they should expect from you? Now, you can wholeheartedly focus on a few things and try to exceed those expectations.

Setting up customer expectations is advantageous in two ways. First, customers notice that your business is willing to go to the next level, which ultimately improves brand credibility and brand loyalty. Second, as you are not making false promises, you won’t need to worry about damage control.

Recruit the right resources and treat them well

Remember, your support reps are potential brand advocates. Thus, it is essential that you hire the right people to manage your customer support service. Invest time to find and recruit the right people as they will be able to improve your brand identity.

But hiring the right people is not enough. For better results, keeping your support executives happy is key. Gamify the workplace to add a component of healthy competition to your support team. Note, exceptional support reps are essential to providing exceptional customer service.

Continuously harvest data

Support provided with information is considered the best. Constantly collecting data not only helps provide informed support but also improve their dialogue with the customer.

Let’s say your customer is having a problem with your product. Now, as mentioned earlier, you can ask the customer for more details to find the root cause. Store this information for future interactions. Your support reps will now be familiar with all details of the customer of the problem has faced in the past. Maintaining customer histories not only saves time but also helps deliver smoother customer interaction.

Use enhanced automated customer relationship management (CRM) tools, such asCentraHub CRM for contact management, in order to personalize the customer support experience.

Personalization matters

Personalized support allows you to deliver a more relevant, one-to-one customer experience. 69% of customers and 86% of businesses say that personalized customer support has a major impact on their loyalty to a brand. This shows how valuable personalizing your customer support service is.

CRM tools are extremely helpful in maintaining a personalized relationship with customers. Apart from data collection, CRM tools are helpful in recording preferences and the interaction histories of every customer. As these CRMs come with outstanding, multi-device adaptability, you can access the data across all your devices.

Treat customers with respect

How you treat your consumers is critical. Support reps need to be honest while offering resolutions to customers’ problems. Misleading your customers significantly harms brand credibility.

During the interaction, support reps need to listen carefully to customer problems and think critically about how the query can be resolved. Additionally, support reps must maintain humility and patience while interacting with customers.

It’s essential to implement ways to improve customer loyalty. Asking for follow-up calls is one of the best ways to do it. While following up, acknowledge the efforts of your customers for supporting your brand and encourage add-on purchases.

Always ask customers for feedback on their customer support experience and thank them for choosing your brand.