Launching and selling great products or services for any successful brand is only half the battle because offering exceptional customer service is equally important.
After all, shopping is much more of a transaction, as it is an experience.
By delivering excellent customer service experiences, your clients will associate the good feeling with every transaction with your brand. As a result, they’ll be more likely to come back and do business with your brand, boosting your revenue.
Here are five more reasons why delivering excellent customer service experiences is crucial and how it can increase your revenue even further:
- It adds more value to your services and products.
- It improves customer retention rates and recurring revenue.
- It results in positive reviews, enhancing your brand credibility.
- It improves your team’s morale, reducing turnover costs.
- Finally, it adds more value to your brand.
Research shows that 20% of small businesses will fail within the first year. Why? The primary contributing factor is poor customer service.
The Value of Customer Support Management
Have you heard of any customer service horror stories recently? Poor customer service happens more often than you think. A survey by PwC shows that 1 in 3 consumers will abandon a business they love after just one incident of bad customer experience. On top of that, 92% would altogether leave a brand after 2-3 unpleasant experiences. Based on these statistics, your margin of error is relatively small.
But there’s good news. Excellent customer service increases customer loyalty and purchases. So, if you focus on delivering better customer service experiences, you’ll open doors to more potential sales. Research from Harvard Business Review found that consumers who had positive experiences spent 140% more than those with negative experiences.
4 Ways to Make Customer Service More Profitable
Let’s now dive into how you can leverage customer service to deliver great experiences for customers and ultimately increase your revenue.
1. Show Empathy and Listening Skills
Empathy is a mindset, a culture, and the core of a successful company. Thus, it should be the driving force that shapes all activities inside a company, whether they’re customer-facing. Empathy starts with listening to customer concerns and questions, understanding, and anticipating the needs of each customer. In customer service, this involves putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and seeing the problem from their perspective. It also means anticipating what the needs and wants of a customer are at a specific instance within their journey. In addition, it’s about delivering on those needs and wants by providing a positive experience.
Remember, being empathetic doesn’t mean you must agree with the customer—it simply means you see things from their perspective. Empathy ultimately bridges the gap between your brand and the customer, improving trust and loyalty.
To be empathetic to your customers’ needs and wants, you must:
- Listen actively. Listening is challenging, especially in noisy environments. However, to empathize with your customers, you must focus on them to determine the problem they’re experiencing. Often, customers contact customer support during the peak of their frustration, so you must pay attention to what the customer is saying and how they’re saying it. This means determining the customer’s tone and language and mirroring their tone to help them through their issue. Also, avoid interrupting the customer and ask questions where necessary to delve deeper into the customer’s queries to prevent miscommunication and misunderstandings.
- Personalize customer interactions. When you look at the customer’s profile, try to see the person, not just a summary of their journey. Recognize the issues they’re experiencing and validate their feelings. Restate, respond, and summarize the customer’s problems using their exact words. Validate their perspective to encourage them to offer additional information.
2. Implement Customer Feedback and Public Reviews
Customer feedback, both negative and positive, is crucial for any brand. You can reduce negative feedback by listening to their customers and acting on their feedback.
Undiluted customer insights can also help you profoundly understand your customers and their needs. In addition, implementing customer feedback and online reviews can help you identify areas where you should allocate more money to get the highest return on investment.
For instance, after collecting customer feedback, you may realize that you should focus on marketing your brand to gain more exposure instead of focusing on product development. Customer feedback is an invaluable source of vital information. However, you must learn to listen to your audience and translate their feedback into actionable takeaways to improve your brand, products, and services.
So, you must never ignore your clients’ voices because they’re the ones who use your services and products. Thus, they know what can be improved to make them happier, ultimately driving more sales and boosting your annual revenue. Also, you must use customer feedback across all departments in your company. Finally, customers’ insights can help you upgrade your products, deliver better customer service experiences, and improve customer satisfaction.
3. Loyalty and Revenue Growth
Nate Brown notes, “loyalty is earned by articulating a helpful brand promise and following through with excellent [customer experience] delivery.”
Loyal customers are a goldmine for your business. They keep generating more revenue without you having to use any money to gain new customers. Loyal customers also give you feedback to help you improve the quality of your products and offer better customer service experiences. Thus, building customer loyalty is mandatory for any business that wants to survive and grow.
More benefits of building customer loyalty include:
- Brand advocacy. Delighted customers are your best salespeople. When you offer excellent customer service experiences that exceed their expectations, they’ll gladly recommend your brand, products, and services to their friends and family at no extra cost. In addition, these happy customers can bring in new prospects through word-of-mouth marketing, who may also become loyal advocates for your business.
- Brand expansion. There are several ways you can scale your business through existing customers. For example, you can upsell them other products they may need or cross-sell three of their favorite products by offering them a bundle discount to encourage them to buy them at an affordable price. In addition, by having a large pool of loyal customers, you can lower your churn rate, which is an excellent way to boost your revenue without having to spend a ton of money to attract new customers.
So, delivering excellent customer service experiences to improve customer loyalty is one of the most profitable investments you can make. Some studies suggest that improving customer loyalty is more crucial than lowering operating costs. That’s because a 2% increase in client loyalty has the same impact on your profits as decreasing your operating costs by 10%.
4. Offer Immediate Support
Excellent customer service equals instant customer support. It doesn’t matter if you use the most advanced customer support software or have the most experienced customer service team in the world if your customers are long gone before you can answer their questions and concerns. 44% of Americans feel that the average customer support response time must be below 5 minutes. This shows that consumers are more impatient than you think.
If you’re using traditional email communications to respond to customer queries, for example, it’s next to impossible to respond to customers fast. So instead, use live chat and instant messaging apps to offer immediate support. These options will help you offer real-time and top-quality customer service, improving customer satisfaction and ultimately increasing your revenues by building loyal advocates.
So, if you want to make your customer support management more profitable, don’t keep your clients waiting for too long. Keeping your customer support response times low is critical.
Offer Better Customer Service Experiences with Zight (formerly CloudApp)
Zight (formerly CloudApp) is an all-in-one visual communication tool that you can use to capture and embed screencasts, GIFs, HD videos, screen recordings, marked-up images, and screenshots throughout your customer service and support workflows. For example, with Zight (formerly CloudApp), your customer support and service teams can save time by explaining complex concepts visually. Also, with HD videos, screen recordings, screenshots, and GIFs, your teams can instantly respond to customer questions and concerns by embedding visuals directly to email, shared docs, productivity apps, and even collaboration tools.
The team at Social Tables, for example, uses Zight (formerly CloudApp) to close customer support tickers 7 minutes faster. As a result, this team also saves a minimum of 3 hours per week, improving customer retention and satisfaction.