The Secret Strategy of Customer Service │ Best Customer Service Strategy

21 min read

Customer service is an essential job in a company. And today, we’re going to learn about the best 11 strategies for your customer support in your business.

Customer support is the most necessary service of any business, and it helps to connect our customers with our company. It helps to make our customers loyal. Also, the best customer support can make our customers a promoter of the company. So, we must not compromise for the best quality customer support in our business.

That’s why I am here to help you to succeed in your business. Let’s dive into our learning!

 

 

Top Customer Service Strategies

 

 

A study by American Express found that satisfied customers tell around eight people about their positive experience, while unsatisfied customers complain to 21 different people.

Not only that, but consumers won’t always stick around to give a business a second chance after one bad experience. 86% of consumers have stopped buying from a company after a negative experience.

So, what do you find in the above research? Well, if you have poor customer support, then your company’s reputation, brand value, customer loyalty, sales and revenue, popularity, and profitability will all start to fade.

But I don’t want to happen that with your business. So, here are the best 11 strategies for your customer support service. Don’t skip or quit the site because I don’t want you to miss any ideas from here.

 

Develop a Customer Service Vision, Mission, and Goals

To start anything, at first, you need to have a clearly defined purpose. The purpose is the only emotions that energize us to work and achieve something.

So, you should develop your customer support vision, mission, and goal that will satisfy your company’s business model.

 

  • Vision: It should be long term prospects that increase the value of your company. Make a vision to achieve in the coming years, and after you accomplish your vision, it will be the most blissful moment of your business.

 

  • Mission: Mission is the short term plan that increases the popularity of your company. It helps you to bridge the goals with your vision. So, develop the mission that contributes the power to achieve the company’s success.

 

  • Goals: It can be achieved within a short time and carry values for your vision. Goals are the small pieces of a mission, and you should connect all those pieces to see progress into a big picture.

 

Thus, our first strategy for customer support is to develop the right and meaningful vision, mission, and goal for our customer support service.

 

If you can’t see your goal, then you can’t achieve it.

 

Hire the Best and Right People

Employees are the creator and developers of the company. Without employees, no company can run as a company. But it doesn’t mean that any people can work as an employee.

 

 

Top Customer Service Strategies

 

 

So, here are the five focused intrinsic skills and motives that you can use to identify the best employee while hiring for your customer support service:

 

  • Love to do customer support job: If they love their job, then no distraction can distract them. They can even sacrifice their other joyful aspects of life to fulfill their work for their job.

 

  • Passionate for developing customer support skills: If your employees want to shape their customer support skills, then no doubt that they can accomplish any tough jobs.

 

  • Understand your company’s core values and philosophies: Your employees must understand you and your company’s vision. If they also have the same goal with their customer support skills, then hire them. But if they are not ready to work for the company’s sole purpose, then kindly reject them.

 

  • Cope with the company’s vision, mission, and goals: There may arise many unexpected problems or requirements in your company. You may sometime need to change the schedule and work structure for your company. So, make sure that your employee is ready to go with any worst situation to achieve the company’s vision, mission, and goals.

 

  • Eagerly want to achieve fame and success: See, it is not wrong to dream for the sole purpose and successful life as an employee. You are also running a company for your dream and success. So, the best situation is to make alive every employee’s dream and purpose inside their heart. Otherwise, why would they work for you if you can’t help them to achieve their hope?

 

I believe that strong faith and belief are more promising than any resume paper.

 

So, for communication skills, interpersonal skills, language skills, technical skills, and many other required skills for any customer support service, you can provide them the best training and workshop. And after that, the remaining of the work will start to happen surprisingly.

 

Wrong employees breakdown your business, but the right employees give your business a breakthrough.

 

Motivate and Empower All Customer Support Representatives

Nobody can stay positive or motivated all the time. It is a proven fact that every people get more than 60,000 thoughts every single day. And nobody can control their thoughts and feelings.

So, it is necessary to motivate employees to make them stay in the right condition. If employees are not well empowered and inspired towards their work, then it can cause on lack of efficiency and effectiveness in their service.

Thus, here are the best six ways to motivate and empower your customer support employee:

 

  • Check scoreboard: If you measure employee’s practice, effort, and the result, it can help you to determine their strengths and weaknesses. And then, all the employee will give their best to make their scoreboard most successful because you are going to reward and punish them as per their scoreboard.

 

  • Give rewards for the best customer support: Always intrinsic rewards are not enough to motivate employees. If you reward the best customer support practice from your employees, then they will again try to beat that record. And it helps them to improve continuously. Also, it sets the benchmark for other employees too.

 

  • Integrate the job with their future success: Every employee has their own set of desires, dreams, expectations, and goals. So, if you can integrate the job roles that help them to achieve their success, then they will involve their life into it.

 

  • Provide a target for positive reviews from customers: Set the target for every employee to satisfy their client. If they have goals and aims that are related to their skills, then obviously they try to push them out of their comfort zone.

 

  • Recognize the importance of customer loyalty: Until and unless you didn’t realize the importance of that particular job, you are never going to accomplish it. So, make sure that you have taught the positive sides and prospects of customer loyalty to all your customer support representatives.

 

  • Give them full authority to handle customer problems: Let your employees find their way to solve customer’s problems. It helps them to take responsibility, accountability, and ownership of their job. If they feel that they are the owners of that company, then they will never stay silent for negative feedback.

 

If you want more power, then you need to empower.

 

Collect as Much Feedback as You Can

Feedback of customers is the primary resource of customer support service. Forget budget, forget employees, forget training, forget skills, forget everything.

So, you should start to communicate with your customers. After you collect feedback, you are going to convert it into feedforward, because it needs two-way communication to complete any customer support service.

 

 

Collect as Much Feedback as You Can

 

 

If you don’t have any complains and reviews from your customers, then how you are going to evaluate your company’s progress. So, the more you have customer feedback, the more you can solve it. And the more you solve their problems, the more they will get satisfied with you.

There are many ways to collect feedback from customers. It will be better if you can gather it in all possible ways.

So, let me briefly list down the options for collecting customer’s feedback:

 

  • Visitor’s interaction form: Use on your official website or landing page.

 

  • Customers feedback form: Dedicated feedback forms and accessible anywhere, online or offline.

 

  • Product or service reviews: Comments or reviews options that reside in your online shopping site beneath the products are displayed.

 

  • Surveys and market study: Your marketing team collects the data from the market through various data collection agencies or from your marketing campaign.

 

  • Checklist and MCQs: Provide them a quick filling form to select an opinion for the most valued features of your product or service.

 

  • Social listening: Observe the trends of your product or services on social media, through people’s posts, comments, tags, videos, shares, references, etc.

 

  • Independent mailers: Never miss the mail that directly came from your customers through the emailing platform.

 

  • Third-party review sites: Check third-party review sites that give access to reviewing your product or service to all independent customers or website visitors.

 

  • Online communities: Go and find about your company’s talk in professional communities. Like – Pinterest, Reddit, Quora, Facebook Group, YouTube, etc.

 

  • Direct mailing: You can mail your customers through an official newsletter by asking about quick feedbacks for using your product or service.

 

  • Phone calls: Also, it is good to make a direct call and request them to share some experiences or current problems with your services.

 

  • Testimonials: Well, it is only a positive review to showcase your company’s reputation. But don’t miss happy customers to ask them for professional testimonials. It increases your company’s credibility.

 

Complaining customers are far better than the silent customer. Because, if they complain, you will get the chance to improve yourself. But if they didn’t complain, when did they switch the company, you even don’t know about it.

So, always worship complaining customers and say thanks for their complaints. The complaining customer wants to stay with you, but they ask you to change a little bit for them. And it is your polite responsibility to adapt to the new environment to satisfy your unhappy customers.

 

If you don’t have feedback, then your customer support is useless.

 

Identify Competitive Customer Support Advantage

Now, what is to do with this competitive advantage in customer support? Yes!

It has it’s own importance, and no successful companies will tell you about this, because it is a secret for any business. But no problem, when I am with you, nothing will remain secret at all.

Competitive advantage is the advantage which is possessed by only one company, and no other has this kind of attribute. It concludes that that benefit can only provide by one company, and all the competitors can never beat that company on that particular service.

So, it is necessary to know about your strengths and weaknesses. And if you know this, then you can use and modify it limitlessly. Every successful company knows its competitive advantage and are all using it repeatedly.

Then you may ask how do I know about it for my company? Well, we are on the topic of customer support, so let me give you that secret technique, which helps you to know about your strengths and weaknesses.

 

Positive Method

It helps to identify the top quality of your customer service and will give you a direct chance to know the secret attribute of your competitive advantage.

 

  • Identify the best customer service from your company: Observe all reports and data of your customer support representatives. If you could find the best customer support that has been provided by any employee, then it can be your best strength. Look out for that employee who is satisfying most customers, and learn about his/her techniques.

 

  • Identify why your customers have the best feelings towards your service: Only they know the taste, who have tasted it. So, go and ask your most satisfied clients or customer. Ask them why they have the best feelings towards your service? Why they love your customer support? Believe me or not, it will provide you that valuable insight, which you have never dreamt of in your dream too.

 

Negative Method

It provides you the insight on the worst quality of your customer service system and helps you to focus on the solution for improving customer support practices.

 

  • Identify the worst customer service from your company: Now, it will provide you the data of the most useless customer support of your company. After you identify all the worthless customer support employee and their practices, never repeat it.

 

  • Identify why your customers have the worst feelings towards your service: It is also the same as above, but ask the counter-question to your most unsatisfied customers. But remember to make your customer calm and secure! Otherwise, they may get angrier about your queries. And after you get the complaint, take immediate action to resolve it.

 

Alternate Method

It sounds something unusual, but it is the most important than the other two methods. It cares about your missing features that are in demand. Also, it helps you to understand what is going inside in the house of competitors.

 

  • Ask customers what is lacking in your customer service: Well, it sounds something unusual, but this is what you should never miss. Try this, and you will suddenly know about all the lacking features in your support system. It will make your customer satisfied because it proves that you care about them. And for next time, thanks to them after you implemented all features successfully.

 

  • Ask customers what is better at your competitor’s customer service: Does this sound like you should be a CBI officer? Yes, this is what I am talking with you. At first, it creates a sense of humor or some awkwardness for a moment, but ask them in a weighty mood for the second time. If they use a competitor’s service too, then you can get a chance to know about their competitive advantage. Thus, it helps to improve you and develop in a better way than your badass competitors.

 

So, I would recommend you to try all the methods that I have mentioned above. And after collecting enough data, focus on implementing the best strategy.

 

First, identify competitive advantage, then advantage the company.

 

Improve Customer Service Quality for the Long Term

Now, after you have researched your competitive advantage, it is time to use it in the best possible ways. You have done hard work to know about your secret, but if you didn’t use it to improve yourselves, then what will be the benefit of it?

You implement those strategies just right after you discover, it is excellent. But the main question is, how do you sustain it for a long time? How does your advantage will flow and hit to the mind of all the customers of your company?

So, let’s discuss some of the ways to make the most out of it for the long term:

 

  • Knowledge transfer: For succession planning, it is very much required action to transfer knowledge from a leader to a follower. So, just like that, after you discover your true potential, share it with every new and existing employee, and make a guarantee that every one of your employees knows how to use this secret.

 

  • Interchanging the support representatives: Now, every employee has their true potential, and we can’t give them a task to handle something out of their scope. So, identify the best quality of your employees, and assign them the strategy which they can perform it in the best way.

 

  • Re-innovating customer support practice: No first product is a final product. So, you should regularly upgrade the level of strategies and innovate it with more perfection.

 

Focus on the long term, to enjoy a benefit for a long time.

 

Never Say We Can’t

The main mistake that you do in your customer support service is that you say, ‘sorry we can’t do it’ and bang the phone. This way always takes you towards failure.

It is necessary to understand the psychology of the customer. If you deny to solve the customer’s problems or to become more flexible towards customers, then they switch the company. If you want them to stick with your company, then you should say something different than that negative statement.

So, I highly recommend using a positive statement while making conversation or stating the decision with the customer.

Let me state some statements that give an only positive sense, and it triggers the customer’s mind to think positively about your service:

 

  • Sure, we will soon implement it.
  • Thanks for your feedback. Next time it won’t happen.
  • We apologize for that. What can we do to compensate for your losses?
  • It was good that you complain. We feel proud that our customers care for us. Thank You! We will try to fix it as fast as we can.
  • Please don’t get upset. It was our fault. We are ready to do the best from our side.
  • Can you please provide your own opinion? We will try to integrate this into our system for you.

 

You can use more than hundreds of statements to make customers loyal and think positively about you. But all the feelings from that statement must create some hope for your customers.

 

Negative times negative will give you positive only in mathematics, but not in business.

 

Use the Customer’s Preferred Method to Communicate

To whom are you communicating? Obviously, to the king, Right! Customers are the king, and we are their servants. Never forget this statement.

The time you think that you are superior to your customer than I believe that you are nothing more but the worst company ever to exist! Always respect customers and their choice of satisfaction.

Never forget that you are still alive because of customers, and all you have started your business to help the customers. So, when the time comes to satisfy your customer, you just forget what they prefer. That’s why I am here to make you aware.

You are also a customer for some businesses, and remember, how do you feel if you need to communicate from the platform that makes you discomfort. So, all the way I am trying to say that use that mode of communication, which satisfies your customer.

So, you can use any of the below modes of communication with your customers. But remember that the customers must have the choice.

 

  • Phone calls
  • Live Video chat
  • Live text chat
  • Email messaging
  • Social media conversations
  • Face-to-face communication

 

I am raising this issue because most of the socially awkward people prefer to make a conversation through email or text chat modes.

So, if you find any customers who are feeling a little bit of awkwardness, or discomfort, or lack of confidence while speaking through live video chat or phone calls, then you can use email or text chat modes.

 

Say Thanks to Happy Customers

Now, what is a big deal for this strategy? Well, you might be thinking that this is a small step and holds nothing to improve your customer service. But my friend, the case is more sensitive than what you think.

We know those complaining customers are far better than happy customers, and you might be thinking, why should we thank them as they are already satisfied with us? Right! But the point will not end up here.

If you say thanks to your happy customers, then for the next time, they will remain calm and support you on your mistakes. They will better understand you than unhappy customers. And the most, I already have mentioned in the intro that they can even promote our company for free.

And if you delight your customer, then there is a chance that they even can console the unhappy customer. And it helps you to work effortlessly.

Similarly, it helps to enhance the mood of customers, and they will start to adore your company. And the customer will never switch your company because they believe that you take care of them in any situation.

 

Bonus Tips

  • Never speak loud.
  • Listen more to the customers than anything you do.
  • Reply as fast as you can (for text modes).
  • Try to maintain 24/7 support.
  • Always remain calm and never shout.
  • Always show your company’s fault.
  • Never let your customers say sorry.
  • Never lie anything.
  • Reply to all positive and negative feedback.
  • Always say thanks for complaining customers.
  • Try to give some value on free.

 

Bonus tips are also a detailed chapter in itself. But I only mentioned the quick and simple steps to follow regularly, and it is like the icing on the cake.

 

Measure Customer Service Performance

Anything you can not measure, you can not improve. So, if you want to progress or improve something, you need to measure its metrics. If you don’t know the result of your performance, then you can’t determine your effort and result ratio.

So, if any strategy that is helping you to get the maximum result with minimum effort, you must repeat it. And if it is giving you a minimum outcome with maximum attempt, you must leave it.

But sometime you should consider investing more resources to get the little result, and it depends upon the morale of your customer base.

Anyway, if you are getting a satisfying outcome and positive feedback from your customer, you should continue performing the same strategy. Later on, you can innovate strategies that will work best with minimum effort.

And below are the best three ways to measure your customer satisfaction rate:

 

Customer Satisfaction Survey Score (CSAT)

This score is calculated by asking customers to complete a brief survey after you complete the support. The question will be like – How satisfied are you with our customer support? How did our representatives handle your queries? And customers must answer each question with a rating of 1 (very unsatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied).

 

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

It means, on a scale of 1-10, how likely are your customers to recommend your business to friends or relatives? And this is what I always say – a happy customer can be your company’s promoter for free!

 

  • Detractors (Score 1 – 6): If they score your support from 1 to 6, then understand that they are not happy with your support, and it has a high chance that they might complain negative messages about your company to their friends and relatives.

 

  • Passives (Score 7 – 8): If they score your support 7 or 8, then it concludes that they feel quite satisfied with your customer support but are not delighted. And they generally don’t prefer to share anything, positive or negative about your company. But if they got the opportunity to deal with lower prices and more quality than your company’s services, then they will switch without thinking anything.

 

  • Promoters (Score 9 – 10): Again, it must be the goal of any customer service provider. If the customer is rating your service 9 or 10, then it clearly defines that they love your support, and at any cost, they will not switch your company. Similarly, there is a high chance that they will promote your company.

 

Customer Effort Score (CES)

You will be asking one simple question to your customer after an interaction – How easy was it to resolve your issue? It holds a scale of 1 (very difficult) to 7 (very easy). The higher the score, the less effort your customers felt was required on their end to resolve – and they are more satisfied with your support.

 

You need to carry out all three measuring methods, and only using one test will not give you a full picture. So, after you compile and evaluate all the measuring metrics of your customer support performance, you will understand where are your support quality is traveling.

 

Conclusion

So, after you have completed understanding all the strategies, I hope you can now use it in your company to upgrade your support level.

Don’t forget that customers are holding our company in the market, and we must not create any chance to make them feel unsatisfied. It is our polite duty to serve our customers and treat them like a king.

Carry your strategy with the vision to make your customer support service the best than any other company.

 

I trust you appreciated understanding this and get insight into your curiosity.

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