Sometimes, doubling your revenues isn’t as hard as you think. But you keep revamping the wrong business units, believing that a more efficient sales & marketing team would get your more money. However, when it comes to “improving the profitability of your company”, sales & marketing isn’t always the correct answer.
Sometimes, it’s the customer service strategy that needs remodeling in order to maximise your business profit.
Today, every business requires to create & deliver exceptional customer experience to be called a Top of the Mind Brand. Customers have grown powerful enough to make or mar your business. They are at the centre of everything. When they are happy with a purchase, they not only buy from you again but also become your fiercest brand ambassadors.
In fact, I would go on to say that the term “Customer Satisfaction” has now become obsolete and should thus be replaced with “Customer Ecstacy”. Because plain Satisfaction doesn’t push revenues too far. It is the wow factor that makes customers fall in love with your brand and that gets your business increased sales & revenues.
Benefits of a great customer team beyond Relationship Building:
The science of generating profit is simple. Your marketing team captures and transfers potential leads to your sales team. And your sales team successfully pitches and converts them into highly paying customers.
But if your brand is simply stuck at gaining new customers only, sooner or later, it will hit your revenues. What is important here is to not only gain new customers but also to retain them! The cycle goes something like this: find new customers, sell them, and win them. Loyal customers or repeat customers will come back to you again and again.
Here’s how great customer service ensures more profit:
- Loyal Customers spread brand goodwill
- Happy customers invite more customers
- More customers lead to more sales & profit
- Greater Brand Awareness leads to becoming a Market Leader
- Helps in Building brand reputation
Now that you know why customer support is so important in driving profit. Here, is how you can tweak it to double your company revenue:
- Building a Dream Customer Team: the right skills and the right tools will take you only as far as customer satisfaction. It’s the customer-first attitude that separates good business from a great one! Here are the top 5 qualities that a well-trained customer service professional must possess: a) Great Interpersonal skills b) Empathy c) Patience d) Adaptability e) Problem-Solving Attitude. When a customer success person receives a customer query, they should be quick to devise an intelligent solution and revert to them with a clear answer. They should be good at both written and spoken communication skills.
- Asking for Customer Feedback: Customer Feedback is important because it helps you visualise the services/products from the customers’ point of view. It allows you to understand how a customer feels about your products; which services require upgrades; what more features can you add to the product to optimise customer utility. Sometimes, the team building the product cannot see its loopholes as clearly as does the customers. An honest feedback will bring you closer to its real strengths & weaknesses, helping you make the final product highly consumable, reliable, and efficient.
- Creating AI laced Chatbots: We all know how important Chatbots can be in capturing leads, delivering timely responses, driving smart conversations, and emboldening your entire customer experience. But did you know you can make your own AI laced Chatbots for your website and apps? And that just in 10 minutes! Checkout “How to Create an intelligent Chatbot in just about 10 Minutes”. Nobody can pitch a brand better than the team that created it. And that is why, instead of giving customer teams a workable Chatbot, empower them by letting them construct a unique & highly efficient Chatbot by themself. These chatbots are essential in streamlining customer support services and driving greater revenues.
- Employing Customer Service Software: Having an effective customer service software is as important as having a customer support team. It streamlines all your customer facing efforts. When the customer base starts growing, it becomes impossible to keep a manual track of every single email, and conversation. An effective customer Service Software makes handling, monitoring, and driving customer-relationship so much easier! You can organize all our projects in one place. Have a clear insight into consumers’ history, check what their previous responses were, and act accordingly. Automation helps streamline all the chaos. It is effective, economical, and delivers great results in a very short span of time.
- Staying Open & Accessible: The entire point of having great customer support is to listen & resolve customers’ grievances as quickly as possible. If it is not quick, customers get disheartened. If the process of getting in touch with the support team isn’t easy, customers lose interest and move on. So, the more transparent the communication is between your and your consumers, the better builds the relationship. That is why being accessible is so very important in the customer support business. From email, to social media, to Phone Numbers, try to build different channels that consumers can use to get in touch with you. Ensure you are active on each platform and respond to their queries as soon as possible.
- Learning the art of Retaining customers: You just closed a conversation with a customer. They didn’t seem to have many complaints. And yet, as soon as you kept down the receiver, they were lost to you. Sometimes, customers don’t open up about their troubles because the customer team isn’t asking them the right questions. You are sending multiple choice questions in their directions. But their problems are more open ended. To get them to honestly answer, you will have to dial them up, have a one-to-one conversation, and ask them about their entire experience. Ask them for their advice on how to improve both, the product as well as the customer experience. And at the end of the interview, surprise them with an incentive, a discount, or a generous coupon. That last incentive bit is called Delighting the customer. They will definitely share this experience with their friends & family.
- Optimising website for mobile: Here is an amazing piece of information that will make you immediately pull up your socks and optimise your website for mobile. 77% of 18-24 years old contact customer support exclusively via their mobile phones multiple times in a month. That is not all! 75% customers of 35 – 44 years of age approach customer support via their mobiles. This should confirm to you, in today’s time, how important it is to have an optimised website for mobile. If your website isn’t responsive or is taking too much time to load, half of your potential customers will move to a competitor’s website. In a world where one single customer can make all the difference, imagine losing half of your customer lot to a competitor! Therefore analyse your mobile website, hear from your customer feedback, and try to build a great mobile experience.
Can My Organization afford these customer support services?
If you found these above-mentioned customer support services useful. But are afraid that you won’t be able to get them in your budget. Here is a piece of great news for you. While you must put aside a significant amount of your budget for buying customer-related software & tools, the rest and most of it is completely free.
The first step should be to train your customer team so they are able to give a personal touch to all their conversations. They should always sound cheerful, act patient when a client is voicing their grievance, and find a permanent solution to repetitive queries.
Another great & free customer support idea is to start a group on platforms such as Facebook and reddit. Your customer team can stay ever present here, answering product related queries, driving conversations, and building long-lasting bonds.
According to Microsoft’s State of Global Customer Service Report, “ 54% of respondents say they have higher expectations for customer service today than they had one year ago. This number jumps to 66% for the 18–34-year-olds surveyed.”
Wrapping up:
Customer support should not be placed at the end of the customer cycle. It should rather be put at the center of it. Of course, they help delight the customers that the sales team got in the funnel. But, many a time, it is the good customer experience that reaps in more customers. Word of mouth marketing helps a lot in gaining new customers without any effort. And you can, by providing a great customer experience, build a huge network of consumers who do free marketing for you. Also, one thing that is to be kept in mind always is that people put more faith in other consumers’ reviews than on what a brands’ marketers or sales personals say.
With Crowdfire, you can find curated content, schedule your posts, engage with your audience, deep-dive into analytics and create custom reports. Now introducing Social listening. Try it for free.
Thanks for the helpful post, have a nice day!