
10 Omni-Channel Customer Service Best Practice Tips

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Learn MoreToday’s customer service industry is highly competitive. Customers are more demanding and powerful than before. They also possess more knowledge than they did previously and can be known to hold companies to difficult standards.
If your intention is to impress your customers and keep their business, you need impeccable customer service. And that means omni-channel and consistent support. Why omni-channel assistance?
According to a recent study by the Aberdeen Group, best-in-class companies deliver consistent messages to customers across all channels and 89% customers dislike repeating their queries. This post contains a list of 10 omni-channel customer service tips that you can use to surpass your customers’ expectations and make a mark in your business.
If you run a business in 2018 and can’t offer uncompromised support on mobile, you will face the wrath of frustrated customers. Today’s market prioritizes accessibility of companies, and mobile phones are among the most popular easy-access media. In fact, 87% customers actually use mobile devices to make purchases and often complain that customer service via mobile is unsatisfactory.
Customers today have a low tolerance towards technical difficulties and want instant resolutions. That’s why they tweet to get a response. Twitter (and other social media platforms) has provided customers a way to catch the attention of companies and have them resolve customer service issues instantaneously.
In fact, 42% of the customers who participated in a study said they expected companies to respond to social media mentions within 60 minutes!
Customers love quick-resolve routes that are present the least hassles. This is particularly true of enterprise and high-level customers who are represented by executives who have little time on their hands. Such customers can’t be dealt with on a schedule because they need to be prioritized, and nothing says priority quite like a face-to-face call.
In fact, according to a Forrester study, interactive chat can result in as much as a 120% ROI in a 6 month payback period.
A good segment of your customers, 50% according to this Zendesk study, want to resolve their issues by themselves, without having to involve your customer support team. Catering to such customers is critical because they’re the ones that will cost your customer service team the least and turn better cost-to-profit ratios. Such customers are usually satisfied working with self-serve FAQs, documentation and video content.
Email is still relevant in the customer service industry, according to an eConsultancy report. And email should be part of your customer service system because it’s easy to manage, still effective and can resolve a good number of your customers’ queries.
Email customer service is especially easy to manage because of CRMs today that offer email automation workflows that can save your customer service executives a ton of time and effort.
Understanding customer needs and behavior is a key to providing effective customer service. According to Brian Tracy, all customer purchases are driven by eleven basic needs which are money, security, status and prestige, health and fitness, praise and recognition, power, influence, and popularity, leading the field, love and companionship, personal growth and transformation. These needs can be addressed when managing customer service.
Wufoo’s Kevin Hale has two great ideas that involve customer behavior data. The first is to use website page analytics to optimize your FAQs and documentation. Look at the beautifully and customer-focused design of Wufoo’s document libraries.
The second is to run small experiments to reduce customer service issues. Wufoo implemented emojis on their customer issue report form and noticed a huge drop in angry complaints.
Company culture affects customer service and how internal rewards can motivate customer service executives to behave the right way with customers. If the tone of your customer service is set to be rigid and not flexible, your executives will embrace the same tone when interacting with customers. And in a large customer service system, it’s hard to track the quality of service and ensure that it stays up to standards, so setting the tone initially is crucial.
The online experience affords an unparalleled insight into understanding customer struggles by allowing customer service executives to view data of every click, swipe, and tap that occurs on a browser or an app. And now there are multiple platforms through which your customers can engage your brand and being present and proactive on those platforms can go a long way with sales and customer service.
For instance, if your customer has made a request/query on one platform, they wouldn’t want to repeat the same on another. And according to Aberdeen Group’s report, companies that provide consistent service across platforms retain 89% of their customers.
According to a study conducted by SHRM (Society for Human Resource and Management), hiring by poor culture fit can cost an organization between 50% and 60% of a person’s annual salary. And this can reflect on that company’s customer experience, especially when the wrong employees are made to directly interact with customers. That’s why it’s critical for any organization to hire customer facing employees who fit that organization’s culture and values well.
It all comes down to empathy. Even with the right technology, you can’t provide commendable customer service unless you have empathy. It begins with how you craft the customer experience, to how to build your product and your customer service system. What your customer service executives say to customers via email and calls matters. An insensitive customer service executive can lose you customers and revenue.
Here’s an example of JetBlue’s extremely empathetic customer service.
The way your company conducts customer service in today’s market can affect your rate of success and directly affect your revenue. With the right customer service technology, talent, and strategies, you can transform the performance of your business.
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