No great product is going to sustain in the market without knowing the needs of the customer – pre and post sales.
Customers are demanding
“96% of unhappy customers don’t complain, however 91% of those will simply leave and never come back” – 1st Financial Training services
The above statistic tells you that you will retain only a about of 5% of your customers who are unhappy. Every business comes with competition and if you keep them unhappy, all it takes is a Google search for them to find your competitor and shift base.
100% satisfaction. No more. No less
When it comes to delivering great customer experiences, it means giving exactly what your customer wants. Why we stress on the word ‘exactly’ is because a minimal deviation from their expectation is all it takes to trigger a thought process that would eventually lead to losing that customer.
“Customers who rate you 5 on a scale from 1 to 5 are six times more likely to buy from you again, as to if they ‘only’ gave you a score of 4.8.” – TeleFaction data research
That 5 on 5 is what you need to aim for and deliver consistently throughout the course of your business cycles.
Customer Satisfaction reaps rich rewards
A high customer satisfaction rate ensures a lot of critical metrics for your company.
- A high customer retention rate – When customers are happy, they stick with your company for long, thereby ensuring better profits.
- Employee satisfaction – Your employees are going to be a lot more motivated working for a company where customers are happy, than fighting day-long battles convincing customers to stay back when they turn away.
- Growth opportunities – When you know you have customer satisfaction, your management can focus on other areas of growth like service innovation, financial stability and product roadmaps which in turn will contribute to customer satisfaction.
- Free Marketing – When customers are happy, they talk about it. Here is a pretty compelling statistic to make the point.
“Happy customers who get their issue resolved tell about 4-6 people about their experience.”
“A dissatisfied customer will tell between 9-15 people about their experience. Around 13% of dissatisfied customers tell more than 20 people.” – White House Office of Consumer Affairs
- Lesser investment in customer support – When you have garnered 100% satisfaction, you automatically reduce support issues and also the money spent on the support process.
There has always been a long running debate on whether customer service has a direct impact on customer satisfaction.
In a detailed Research paper conducted by Umeå University, based on three important parameters and three different sampling factors, the following conclusions were made.
This goes to show Customer service quality has a direct impact on Customer satisfaction, which governs three important factors – Reliability, Responsiveness and Empathy.
Now to go about providing this kind of customer service, there are certain areas your customer service representatives need to be highly skilled at. We have summed some up for you.
The Drive
Let your customer service representatives understand the importance of providing excellent customer service and emphasise the need to consistently deliver the same. In short, imbibe the drive to deliver world class customer experiences.
The Understanding
It is not enough always wanting to give when you don’t know what to give. Understand your customer expectations at any given point of time and keep your customer service representatives educated about it at all times.
The Adaptation
Customer expectations are never the same at all times. Steve Jobs sums it up for you.
“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” – Steve Jobs
Gather regular feedback from customers and constantly conduct surveys to know the changing trends. Engage them in healthy conversations to understand their evolution in needs ahead of time.
The Implementation
What good is all these metrics and stats without actual results. Let your customers service reps know about these changing trends and implement methods to deliver customer experiences that satisfy your customer needs at all times.
The Evaluation
Your customer service reps are doing their jobs. The customers are happy. Does the cycle end there? Nope. You need to evaluate your customer service representatives by tracking their support metrics to see if they are constantly delivering the best customer experiences. Fix loopholes if any, clear out hurdles they may have in delivering top class support and make sure your company is right on top of the industry performance.
We have given you a quick crash course at customer service training. If you feel we have missed out anything important in our blog, we are welcome to comments. After all, we need feedback too. There are always tools to provide the best in customer support. Start providing great customer service experience today.
