How Do You Deliver Exceptional Customer Service And Safety

Kyle Gawley is the CEO and co-founder of Get Invited, as well every bit a correspondent to the Nutshell blog.

Customer service is a powerful tool for both increasing customer retention, and acquiring new customers by creating loyal evangelists who will promote your concern on your behalf.

Below are six customer service tactics that I've learned from our own experiences at my event ticketing company, Become Invited and also from the perspective every bit a customer of some other great companies.

These are (mostly) free, easy to apply, and they deliver real, tangible results in the form of increased memory, new customers, and revenue.

Let's get started.

1. Get to know your customers

As with a new friendship or spousal relationship, every relationship that you lot build in life requires you to invest some of your time in getting to know the other person.

Building customer relationships are no different.

Let'southward look at dating as an example: You invest a portion of your time with some other person and enquire them questions so you can learn about their interests and passions in life. You also begin to develop an agreement of their personality and then build rapport with them based on this.

If you utilise a similar arroyo to customer service and invest the time in getting to know your customers on both a commercial and personal level, you'll exist on the path to developing stone-solid client relationships that stand the examination of time.

‍How can you do this?

‍It's simple. You go and talk to your customers and find out every bit much as y'all tin almost them and their feel of using your product or service.

You tin can do this in a number of ways:

Email

Sending a personalized email to your customers is a great way to go insights well-nigh your business and measure the quality of the feel they're having.

I send emails to our Get Invited customers after their effect has ended and ask them how it went, and if there's anything we can do to improve their experience using our production.

This isn't an automated process, these are personalized emails that I hand-write so I can enter into a dialogue with the customer.

You can install as many heat-mapping, funnel, and tracking tools into your production equally you lot like, merely it's no substitute for customer feedback. We've received lots of insights almost things our tracking tools didn't pick up, which we were completely unaware of, just were crucial to delivering an exceptional user experience.

This arroyo also demonstrates that yous intendance about your customers' needs and you're striving to ensure they are being met, which further cements the relationship.

Alex Turnbull from Groove wrote a not bad commodity near the process he used to talk to 500 customers in four weeks. I'd highly recommend reading information technology.

Zoom

If you want to have this a pace further, why not enquire some of your customers if they'd like to take a quick 15-minute Zoom with you to tell you about their experience using your product?

Not everyone will have the time to exercise it, just some volition and they'll really capeesh the opportunity to talk nearly their experience.

You should accept a structure in identify for the telephone call, with specific questions to guide the conversation—just besides provide the opportunity for your client to freely talk and provide their own feedback and suggestions.

Social media

Ane of the biggest mistakes business organisation owners make on social media sites is trying to wait similar the cool kid with loads of followers while following merely a handful of people.

Relationships are a two way thing. If a customer follows you, follow them dorsum!

Following your customers is a great style to acquire near them. I recently gear up a Twitter listing and started adding our customers to it, now I can set aside some fourth dimension every week to look at what our customers are talking near on Twitter and larn about what they're interested in.

Yous tin use your CRM tool to keep notes and if you're using Nutshell, it automatically pulls in the social profiles of your customers for you to save fourth dimension.

Another not bad feature to take inspiration from in Nutshell are the customer avatars. Getting to know your customers properly requires that yous know what they expect like—and the opposite is also true. If you want to establish groovy relationships through your online communications and so add together your photograph to every client communication.

We include a modest avatar in our customer emails, so the recipient feels similar there'due south a existent human being on the other end.

2. Act with urgency

If yous're a pocket-size business, then your greatest weapon against your larger competitors is speed.

When dealing with large organizations, people are used to waiting for hours or even days for a response. We aim to get back to customers inside 5-10 minutes, and information technology's amazing how often this catches people by surprise because they're not used to receiving such a rapid response.

Even if nosotros tin't bargain with their issue right away, nosotros always transport a courtesy e-mail letting the customer know that we're looking into it for them. There is nothing worse than leaving people hanging and making them feel ignored.

Rapid responses are not but a great tactic for making your existing customers happy, they can too help to learn new customers.

On several occasions, nosotros've converted customers from our competitors after we noticed their frustration with slow response times on Twitter and jumped in and engaged with them quickly. They were so impressed they moved over to Get Invited in minutes.

three. Practice things that don't scale

Sometimes, y'all will have to do things that don't calibration in order to make your customers feel special. This is a great competitive advantage because large companies rarely offer bespoke features for individual customers.

When we managed the ticketing for The Spider web Is... Conference concluding twelvemonth, Craig Lockwood, the upshot organizer and avid inventor of Cyberspace of Things devices, wanted to build a device that would alert him every time he sold a ticket.

Craig explained his thought to us and asked if at that place was any style we could help. As you might imagine, nosotros didn't already have an "Internet of Things ticket alert" feature and information technology certainly wasn't on our roadmap, but we got to work and wrote some code that enabled Craig to build his device exactly the way he wanted it.

The finished outcome was a huge lego brick with an LCD counter on the front that showed the total number of ticket sales in real-time, and a bong that rings every time a new ticket is sold!

This certainly wasn't a scalable feature and it's unlikely that we'll ever need to apply it again, merely that doesn't thing. Information technology took us 10 minutes to code and just cost us our time, and guess what? Craig was absolutely delighted that nosotros did this for him and he'due south now a loyal Get Invited client and evangelist.

We've even received new customers that Craig has referred to us, so investing in building great relationships definitely can pb to increased acquirement.

4. Be human

Every communication between you and your customer is the opportunity to develop the relationship, but many communications are robotic, automated emails that lack personality.

Software tin't build relationships; there must be a homo involved in the communication.

You should view every one of these communications as an opportunity to turn a generic message into a personalized experience for your customer.

When we ship out invoices at Get Invited, we could just send these out in a huge, automatic email campaign but we invest some time every week personalizing some of the emails for individual customers. We couldn't practise information technology for anybody every week, just at some point every Get Invited customer will receive a personalized invoice email from us.

Hither's an example:

This isn't hard and it simply takes a few seconds of effort. If y'all've followed Step 1 and ready up a Twitter list, you tin quickly and easily refer to this to find useful chat hooks to utilize when talking to your customers.

5. Use positive language

When communicating with your customers, always aim to use a positive tone of vocalism. We've spent a lot of fourth dimension carefully analyzing our client support emails and considering the words we use.

We've at present eliminated words similar "unfortunately" and "but" and instead focus on words like "absolutely," "happy," and "delighted."

If at that place'southward a request that you can't fulfill, rather than give the customer a flat out "no," offer an alternative solution instead. This volition require a lilliputian extra effort and sometimes thinking outside the box, but it pays off because you lot're demonstrating that you intendance about their needs being met.

six. Do the unexpected

If yous really want to delight your customers, then deliver a positive experience they'll never expect.

Last year, nosotros tweeted saying that we'd love some donuts. Twenty minutes later we heard a knock on the door.

"Stephen from Big Wet Fish says: Exist careful what you wish for."

The delivery guy then handed u.s.a. a box of a dozen delicious donuts!

‍Big Wet Fish are our hosting company. They saw our tweet and surprised us by having a box of donuts delivered to our function.

We never saw it coming, simply needless to say we were all delighted!

Y'all can also achieve the same effect without spending any coin. I recently tweeted about a characteristic thought I'd love to see in Buffer—my social media scheduling tool of choice.

Four minutes afterward, I received a reply from one of the squad saying they'd activated a new experimental feature on my account.

Information technology was exactly what I needed. I certainly didn't tweet considering I expected them to provide me with the feature. I didn't even expect a response. Was I delighted? Absolutely.

Decision

These client service examples are not simply a method to make your existing customers happy, they're too smart (and low price) marketing tactics that you tin apply to grow your concern.

In the examples above, in addition to having had a fantastic experience with Buffer and Big Moisture Fish, these stories are tools that enable me to promote these companies on their behalf.

So, hopefully it's axiomatic that providing swell customer service is a worthwhile investment for any business and it provides tangible results in the form of increased customer retention rates and new customers.

What tactics have worked for you?

Source: https://www.nutshell.com/blog/6-tactics-for-delivering-exceptional-customer-service/

Posted by: williamshumpeatered.blogspot.com

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