Customer service has been with us for many many years. Companies recognized quickly that they not only need to offer a product to the customers, as it is not always enough.
Customers always have some questions in terms of the usage, the arising problems, or other important aspects. If you can promise that your potential buyers can ask you anytime, and you will answer their questions, they will rather buy from you.
Customer service exists for this reason: to ensure that the customers understand and process the information about your product in a very effective way. But customer service won’t be good just because you have it. It requires understanding your target audience, analyzing the arising trends, and in the end: making the customer’s journey more and more comfortable.
In this article, we bring you some tips on how to make your site’s customer service even more efficient. Acknowledge: improved customer service can generate a better user experience, and make your site more trustworthy. These factors will bring you to more sales, and more revenue.
But first, let’s introduce the importance of having customer service and the different options you can use.
Table of Contents
Why do you need customer service?
In this chapter, we will sort out the importance and the advantages of customer service.
Importance
Let me start with an example: in 1982 Johnson and Johnson Tylenol capsules were laced with cyanide, which resulted in the death of 7 people. That’s a tragic event, an event that usually leads to the complete shutdown of a business. Also, Johnson and Johnson needed to recall 31 million capsules to stop even worse scenarios!
As you can expect, customers were frightened, and they were completely furious, and waited for the company’s response in an urgent manner. Well, the response came and it not only stopped the public’s hate for Johnson and Johnson, but later they can introduce Tylenol in the market again. The solution? Clear communication and the building of continuous credibility and trust.
Why did we mention this story?
As it completely shows you the real reason for having customer service. Even if you spoil something or one of your products is faulty, you can still minimize your losses. But that’s just one of its functions. There are some others, which we need to emphasize a little more. We distinguish five different groups, five groups of problems that great customer service can answer effectively.
- General information and inquiries – customer service can answer questions about the history of the company, about your new promotions, provide information about policies and account settings
- Product, or service support – customer service can help you how to use the purchased product or service, how to install software, and solve technical issues in connection with them
- Order management – customer service can help the buyers track their shipped products, make queries about the available products, and assist with order modification or cancellation
- Technical assistant – this assistant not only refers to the product but to other segments. Software, hardware, connectivity issues, integrating products, or new patches; great customer service can help you in all of these
- Enhancing customer experience – useful customer service is not only solving problems but also gathering data. Asking users about their satisfaction in connection with your site, and letting them write/say areas of improvement are also a way how you can use customer service.
Advantages of effective customer services
Customers like it if a company listens to them, and tries to improve based on their opinions, or reactions.
But why do you need to care about your customers’ satisfaction? “Even if one visitor gets annoyed by our aggressive approach, there will be another one, and another one!” That thinking is a huge own-goal. According to Forbes, it may cost four, or five times more to convince a new buyer, instead of a return buyer for a possible purchase! This is too much expense for nothing. For nothing, because a return buyer spends 67% more on average than a new one. So you save money for earning more money, doesn’t look like a bad business, huh?
But even if we – don’t do that really – don’t take these kinds of research very seriously, and thus we only want to convince buyers one time, and that’s all; well, great customer service is essential also.
Research made by Nicejob concluded that 90% of potential buyers think that a salesperson’s speech is less reliable than online recommendations, and reviews. If your one-time customers can’t get answers to their questions, well that can end up being a none on the market.
Effective customer service can enhance the customer experience across the brand. And better customer experience can straightforwardly lead you to more loyal customers. And from here, the equation is so easy: more loyal customers lead you to more purchases, and better conversion rates, which constantly lead you to increased profits.
Bain & Company’s research from 2015 analyzed the correlation between better customer service and better profits. They found out that better customer service can lead to 4-8% increases in revenue. In 2024 this number can be even bigger.
But only if you are capable of being revolutionary from time to time. Nowadays online customer services and chatbots conquer the markets, let’s see their advantages:
Customer service at its finest
Online customer service is nothing but the same as offline customer service, excluding one factor: it works in the online space.
In reality, it has a bunch of advantages:
- Online customer service can be available all day, while offline can only work till the shop is open
- It is easier to ask your questions in the online world, rather than traveling to get answers
- Online customer service can be more interactive than offline. Customers can share their screens, send pictures, or other multimedia content to present their problems. On top of that, online customer service also has more tools in their hands to solve the issues
With the appearance of chatbots, online customer service even improved in some other segments:
- Chatbots reduce waiting times, and customers can get answers quicker
- No more contextual misunderstanding – chatbots communicate the same solutions in the same way every time
Nowadays, online customer service is more common than offline. But that does not mean that you always need to rely on only this option. Online and offline customer service can be both useful, but it can depend on the actual industry that your company is working in.
How to improve customer service?
Now that we know what types of tasks a great customer service must serve, we need to travel to another topic.
We need to find out how to improve our old-but not gold customer service. Luckily, there are plenty of ways in our pockets! In this article, we will introduce four of them!
Use automation, but not always
We are not hearing anything else from the news, just new AI software replacing humans in customer service responsibilities. That would be the way? This chapter will reveal the truth!
⛔ Issue:
In the last couple of years, customer service has been more important than ever in the online scene. Why? Because if you establish it in the right manner, it can be less resourceful than it ever was.
Like, bye-bye human interactions, and extra-long telephone calls, ChatGPT has changed the industry revolutionary. – Well, that’s not perfectly true.
Cgsinc did very interesting research on this topic a few years ago. They found out that even if the customers knew perfectly that chatbots would solve their problems immediately, they still didn’t want to connect them in stressful scenarios. They just don’t trust them yet. Maybe, this trend will change a few years after this boom of artificial intelligence, but today that’s the truth.
Although chatbots have been impactful parts of customer service since their introduction, it’s a wrong assumption to believe that they can solve all of your problems in this industry. Today’s customer service is a mix of human and robotic activities. Finding the perfect ratio? Well, that’s the hard part!
✅ Solution:
There are two things we need to understand.
First: repetitive tasks are easier to solve by robots. They can do them way faster than humans, and they do not complain about burning out.
Second: many times, human intervention is still important. Complex tasks which have more layers, and risky and stressful tasks are still more comfortable to make by humans.
If we accept these two statements you can sort out all of your customer service tasks into two brackets.
Repetitive tasks are essential to do by robots, which include:
- Order tracking
- Appointment scheduling
- Basic account management
- Integrated FAQ section
Non-repetitive, stressful, and emotion-driven tasks are still more human-compatible, just like:
- Complex technical issues
- Crisis management
- Handling unpredictable situations
But there is another method of deciding what tasks must be managed by human workers, and which ones should you throw to the AI. Let me introduce session recordings!
How can you use session recording to improve customer service?
Session recording is a data analytics tool that lets you record, store, and rewatch your users’ individual sessions.
If the word “recording” created negative feelings in you because of the regular updates and stricter regulations of GDPR and CCPA, you don’t have to worry. Many data analytics companies use data masking which helps the data to remain hidden from not just malware activities, or hackers, but from the actual company who uses them to create a better user experience on their site.
Session recordings can be used for many reasons:
- To find solutions to individual problems
- To uncover reasons for statistical data
- To detect bugs and technical issues
And session recording can help you decide how you need to tailor your customer service!
Session recording software allows customer service teams to observe how customers interact with their platform or service in real-time. This insight helps identify common pain points, and areas of confusion, and helps them decide how they should solve problems.
We bravely recommend you try our session recording tool for greater results!
Measure your team
Your customer service team speaks with your potential buyers day to night. The number of satisfied users relies on their level of kindness and expertise. Don’t underestimate the effect of measuring their performance with different indicators.
⛔ Issue:
To improve your customer service from time to time you need to introduce some key metrics. But this time, we don’t want to analyze the visitors (we will actually later), but our team’s success.
How can we do that? Are there any possible measurements that can be used for tracking our colleagues?
Yes, there are! However, I find this topic a little underused in other articles about this topic. That’s why, in this subchapter, we will examine those metrics that you can earn from your team’s data. The next subchapter will be all about how to measure your customers successfully.
✅ Solution:
There are two types of metrics in this area. Performance metrics, and satisfaction metrics. While satisfaction metrics only rely on your customer’s opinions, performance metrics rather measure how your team handles your customer service. How quickly they work, how many problems they can solve, or how professionally they handle different scenarios.
By understanding the main key performance indicators of performance metrics, you can make a perfect team. Establishing an effective customer service team is rather hard than easy: all the team members need great communication skills, emotional intelligence, writing skills, and good listening skills.
But what types of metrics can help you on that journey?
- First response time – it measures how long a customer needs to wait to get help from your customer service. The less the number is, the better your service.
- Average resolution time – it measures the average time your staff needs to solve an issue. Of course, you can also examine your members’ success individually with this metric.
- Resolution rate – this metric shows the percentage of the successfully resolved cases that happened in this first contact.
- Channel-specific metrics – based on what platform, or what channel you want to establish your customer service, there are some other metrics to look at. Abandonment rate can be useful for phone calls, as it can detect how many percent of your help-seeker visitors shut down the phone before solving their problem. Or on email customer service, measuring the average response time can be a great way to be sure about the professionalism of your customer service team.
Strive for the satisfaction of your customers
Customer satisfaction is the whole point of introducing better and better customer service. If you can’t reach this, why do you even want to establish a customer service? But if you want to improve customer service, you need to learn the key metrics of tracking your customers’ satisfaction! This chapter will cover this idea.
⛔ Issue:
Even if you have the best possible team, there’s no guarantee that your customer service is great. Maybe the customers’ expectations and your team’s expectations don’t correlate. Or they are long for other approaches, but you never know if you don’t analyze them as well.
A great customer service team can increase customer satisfaction, but not necessarily. However, if you find out what your customers want exactly, you can manage your team based on these opinions.
✅ Solution:
There are at least four different indicators on how you can measure your customers’ satisfaction and loyalty.
We already got to the point why these two factors are important, and really, by just knowing these numbers you can get a clearer picture of how your brand is doing, and improve your customer service based on these data.
Let’s see them:
- Customer retention rate – one of the best and easiest ways to measure the likelihood of keeping your loyal customers is analyzing customer retention rate from time to time. Customer retention rate comes from an easy equation: if you had 10 customers in 2023, but you have only 6 in 2024, your retention rate is 60%. So this metric basically shows you the percentage of your retained customers.
- Net promoter score – NPS helps you to understand customer satisfaction inside your business better. With a completely normal question – “How likely are you to recommend this company/tool/product/service to others?” – the program distinguishes detractors (0-6 score), passives (7-8), and promoters (9-10). This way you can understand how your customers like your brand, or the product you sell, and get answers if you even need something to change.
- Customer satisfaction – it evaluates your customer’s satisfaction by post-interaction surveys and feedback forms. With email surveys, you can both measure your NPS and customer satisfaction. I demonstrate this tool’s efficiency through an example.
What can email surveys show to us?
If we are currently learning about how to measure your colleague’s performance by email, here’s another very effective way. Email surveys help you to get direct customer feedback, which can not only help you to understand your weak points, but to get comments on your staff’s success and kindness.
Let’s see how it works:
Each time Maria buys something, signs up for your newsletter, or clicks on other predefined triggering points, Maria gets a survey automatically to its email address to rate your service. She can rate your customer service either. After she concludes a score for your service and delivers the survey back, you can evaluate Maria’s result with the others to find out the success of your team.
It’s a great function, which is basically available with Capturly Analytics’s free plan.
Offer omnichannel service
This topic will cover what channels you must establish in customer service to improve it rapidly. Also, you will understand the real difference between multi – and omni-channels, and acknowledge why you should stick with the second one.
⛔ Issue:
The more customers the more channels they use. That’s a simple statement. However, most of the time the growth of the business does not correspond with the improvement of the customer service.
Let’s pick two different age groups. 15-25, and 45-55. It’s trivial for you that you won’t advertise to them on the same platforms, at the same time intervals, or you won’t introduce them to the same content either. But that’s the case with customer service? Do you need to reach them elsewhere? Absolutely! While Maria – a 47-year-old American lady – would gladly ask a question about the business under a Facebook post, Jeremie – a 17-year-old boy – believes this is so awkward.
These nuances didn’t matter in the early rise of the online world, but currently, the race is huge for every customer, and if you don’t spend enough time to understand your buyer’s preferences, you gotta go. And I am not only speaking about generational differences. Extroverts and introverts and calm and aggressive people; they also need different care!
Another problem is that customer trends have changed. Back at the time, a customer only went to the designated website and asked for information there if it was needed. Today, this whole situation can not be compared to the past. The customer meets with the brand more times on social media than on the brand’s actual website, therefore there is a bigger chance that the potential buyer will ask for information on one of the social media platforms.
✅ Solution:
Multi-channel service is like a classic GTA San Andreas cheat code: it can be the answer for all the given problems! Or they aren’t? A recent research showed that 61% of customers have not been able to easily switch from one channel to another when interacting with customer service.
Yes, because multi-channel means your customer service appears on many channels, but separately. It is rather product-orientated than a customer-orientated approach. Ask yourself this question: you wouldn’t be frustrated if you need to repeat personal information 5X a day because customer service directs you continuously to different channels, but channels have no connections.
That’s why if you want to improve customer service, I recommend being in as many channels as possible but creating connections between each channel. By the way, this method has a name: omnichannel service! In an omnichannel approach, the customer’s data is available regardless of the channel they choose to use.
Conclusion
In this article, we made a deep dive into customer service. You learned its importance, the advantages, and today’s status and relevance. After you earned some insights about this topic, we shared four tips on how you can improve your customer service in 2024.
In this part, you got information about automation, and we shared information that sometimes less is more. In this area, it is even more true. We also distinguished metrics you need to look for. As in 2024, there’s not much more important things than measuring both your colleagues’ performance and your buyer’s satisfaction. These metrics will all help you on that journey.
And last but not least, we had some words on omni-channel service, its effectiveness, and the reason why you rather choose this than a multi-channel option.
If you implement these four tips, you can earn some competitive advantage, and create more effective customer service than you ever had.