15 best strategies to improve your customer service performance in 2022

Most organizations shortchange investments in coaching and talent management of frontline staff, leaving service-oriented agents to engage with customers in ways that are a poor fit. For example, if training emphasizes efficiency or pushing offers rather than having meaningful conversations, then agent interactions will likely undermine customer satisfaction. With customers increasingly expecting product offers tailored to their tastes and immediate needs, a blanket approach to customer care falls short. Often, the service channel includes insufficiently robust and diverse offers, caused in part by poor communication between marketing and the service center.

The result of using this kind of customer service and customer support technology will be customers who feel listened to and understood and agents who can exhibit a real sense of empathy. That’ll mean an uptick in customer satisfaction and, crucially, retention. Inevitably, customer service teams and contact center agents will come across customer questions and problems they can’t solve on their own.

Ways to Innovate Your Customer Experience [+Examples]

With a first-hand view of customer issues and needs, you serve them better, improve your products or services, reduce churn, and increase customer lifetime value (CLT). The customer-first mindset across the board makes support teams better at their jobs. When everyone works with the end customer in mind, your customer service team doesn’t have to make solutions look better. Customer loyalty programs are a great way to show appreciation and ensure satisfaction as you’re rewarding customers for continuously doing business with you. These programs are also a form of proactive customer service, as you’re giving special offers and discounts that will enhance and supplement the customer experience. Proper user training and continuous use of your service tools can embed these programs into your customer service teams.

• You can establish a rewards program specifically designed to reward your customers in the most engaging and appropriate way based on their needs and desires and the type of business you have.
• While mostly used for gameplay, it is an emerging channel for businesses to take hold of to offer customer support.
• There’s nothing worse than attempting a “solution,” only to have it miss the mark entirely on solving the actual issue.
• Additionally, empowering employees, streamlining processes, and creating a customer-centric culture are potent ways to elevate service quality.

Unlike face-to-face (or even voice-to-voice) interactions, writing requires a unique ability to convey nuance. How a sentence is phrased can make the difference between sounding kind of like a jerk (“You have to log out first”) and sounding like you care (“Logging out should help solve that problem quickly!”). They’re warm, approachable, and great at teaching other people how things work.

Learn to empathize with your customers

Customers will provide you with immediate feedback that can significantly improve your support process. With AI support teams can simplify task management in order to free up agent time and bandwidth. Being an agent isn’t easy; agents are often responding to the same query hundreds of times a day or are tasked with labeling incoming tickets that must then be sent to the appropriate department. The mundane nature of agent work has contributed to customer service having one of the highest churn rates of any industry with churn as high as 40-45%.

• Answers to your questions should be clear, concise, and in your natural tone of voice.
• Any misstep along the way can lead to the problem or defect that sparked the inquiry.
• They act as a reliable resource always available for help, whether customers want to learn how to use a product or express interest in buying something new from the company.
• No particular checklist of job experiences and college diplomas adds up to the perfect candidate.
• Those are incredibly expensive, and often can be delayed by being more thoughtful about the way engineering makes fixes to solve customer pain.
• These strategies are among the top 5 ways to improve customer service, creating a more pleasant and efficient experience for every customer interacting with your business.

In our experience, customer-care teams can develop curriculums and conduct pilots that lay the groundwork for an enterprise-wide rollout in just three to four months. More important, the results, in the form of more satisfied customers and higher revenues from care channels, make this journey a critical one. For example, one US regional bank that was experiencing a decline in branch visits sought to increase revenues by targeting customers for cross-selling opportunities more effectively. This bank began by evaluating its major products and services (general account servicing, credit card, mortgage) through site visits, agent and supervisor panels, and data analysis. These insights were used to develop a curriculum attuned to call types and common customer needs.

Problem solving skills

But when that happens, it’ll pose a novel challenge for companies looking to grow their customer list. Successful, established companies will have happier customers on the whole, raising the bar even higher for new entrants, even as switching costs of providers decreases for consumers. In the future, reps will only have to deal with edge cases where bots can’t answer questions with the help of a knowledge base or a past history of customer questions. Once you make support content public in a knowledge base, a bot can learn and deliver that information again and again when customers ask for it. Bots and AI will be a game-changer for customer support, where reps spend close to 90% of their time on the job repeating the answers to the same questions and helping customers with the same issues over and over again.

If you want to generate customer-driven innovation, then you’ll need to get in touch with your customers and listen to their ideas. Whether this is through surveys, focus groups, or analyzing common support cases, you’ll need to know how your customers feel about your products and where they think you can improve. Without collecting and analyzing this input, you’ll continue making changes based on your team’s perspective and not off of the recommendations of your customers.

Quite often, customers get intimidated or confused by these articles because the text is too long or too technical to understand. While the rep believes they provided the right answer, the customer still needs to ask additional questions to obtain the information that they’re looking for. The result is customers get irritated because they need a quick solution or answer, not a 20-minute read. You can create subscription-level customer support plans instead of providing the same level of customer service to all clients. For example, the tiered options could be phone support only, phone and email support, and phone, email and social media support for the highest tier.

Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART) goals keep you on track as to whether you can achieve your objectives within a given timeframe. A successful customer service strategy focuses primarily on customer happiness and starts with ingraining that vision deep into your teams. The modern customer service approach means many organizations must invest in talent development initiatives to prepare customer service reps for the future. Now, customers have a variety of channels to receive and send communications, such as text-based social media, online videos, chat rooms, help forums and chatbots. As such, organizations must be more mindful of every potential touch point on the customer journey as an opportunity to reinforce value and ensure customers are happy with the experience.

essential strategies to improve customer service performance in 2022

Besides customer surveys, polls, and focus groups, review websites and social media platforms are a great way to gather online feedback. You get a more accurate picture of what’s working and not for your customers and what could be made better. Simultaneously, take feedback and suggestions from your customer service agents.

Try to actively seek feedback from your employees and understand how your customer care representatives feel about compensation, working conditions and training. By letting them know you are there to support them, it can create positive morale. Your reps must think solutions to improve customer service quickly, make decisions on the fly, and coordinate multiple channels and conversations at once. More than 75% of customers prefer a consistent experience, regardless of the channels they use to engage with a company (social media, in person, by phone, etc.).

Critical Customer Service Tips for Startups & Small Businesses

Step two is positioning the response so the customer feels like you came to the conclusion collaboratively. This creates a more delightful experience than if you were to just copy and paste a prewritten solution. A delightful customer experience typically starts with an enthusiastic greeting. Reps should try to outwardly show their interest in the customer’s problem and express an optimistic attitude towards finding a solution. Underpinning the vision is an API-driven tech stack, which in the future may also include edge technologies like next-best-action solutions and behavioral analytics. And finally, the entire transformation is implemented and sustained via an integrated operating model, bringing together service, business, and product leaders, together with a capability-building academy.

I’ve found that customers want to feel like they’re the only person that matters and like businesses care about them. Make sure you are focused on the specific customer’s needs and doing everything possible to ensure they are satisfied. Show the customer that you care about their experience and put in the extra effort to help them. When you’re providing customer service, take the time to understand what the customer is asking for and find a solution that works for them. Resolve any problems efficiently and as quickly as possible so that the customer doesn’t have to keep coming back.

Part of this involves troubleshooting and answering questions, but most of it is strategizing how the customer will succeed after purchasing something from the brand. Ensure that your staff is knowledgeable about the products and services you offer. This will also help them address customer concerns quickly and effectively. This could mean having someone available to answer the phone or having customer service representatives who can promptly address customer concerns. When thinking about how to improve customer service skills in your team, the starting point is to hire people best suited for the job. One way to do this is to look for personalities and aspirations in interviews in addition to skills because motivated people can learn what’s needed.

As kind as it is to greet customers with a smile, it’s more important to give them reliable, effective service. That may mean improving your overall customer service experience with a combination of in-person and online tactics. This is actually a win-win proposition, as the results of efficient customer service will help your customers and your company. Empowered reps respond more promptly to customer issues and offer champion-level customer experience.

Instead, provide real engineering solutions to the types of problems new software has. Engineers and support people both love quick fixes, but make sure you’re taking a sustainable view to the solutions you’re building. Too often, startups build a house of cards out of bug fixes in an effort to rapidly solve for the customer, only to realize down the road that their app needs a full-on rewrite just to survive.