Providing the best customer service is not easy, but simple things go a long way. To achieve a master level of customer service, you need to get the basics right first. Make sure these three things are in place: every customer is taken into account, customer service is made hassle-free and customer service agents are given the right amount of room to be creative.
The quality of customer service matters. 68% of consumers have tried a new service provider, shop or company because they have heard about its good service, according to the Customer Service Survey.
”68% of consumers have tried a new service provider, shop or company because they have heard about its good service.”
Do you want to be one of these companies? Make sure you do the following three things and you’ll be one step ahead of the rest.
1. Make sure the customer is noticed right away
Few things bother you as much as walking into a shop with your wallet in your hand and finding you’re like air. Customers don’t expect a red carpet, but with attention and a friendly greeting you can instantly put that all-important little smile on their face. Greeting doesn’t mean that the customer’s skin is immediately invaded, but that the customer feels noticed: ’Hi, nice to see you, welcome!’.
Today, as more and more customer experiences are in fact omni-channel, it is important to ensure that rapid attention is paid to all service channels. How quickly are customers greeted if they approach you through electronic channels?
2. Make it as easy as possible for the customer to do business with you
Excellence in customer service is often thought to mean exceeding customer expectations. But according to a very interesting article in HBR and the research behind it, the most important thing is to make the experience effortless.
”Delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; reducing their effort—the work they must do to get their problem solved—does.”Dixon, Freeman & Toman
To make the service experience as effortless as possible for the customer, incentive and measurement systems need to be carefully considered. Many customer service organisations use customer satisfaction indicators (CSATs) as a key measurement tool. However, according to a study by Dixon, Freeman & Toman, these measures have surprisingly little correlation with customer satisfaction. The study found that the Customer Effort Score (CES) correlates much more strongly with customer satisfaction. If you are not yet familiar with CES, we strongly recommend reading the article that is the source material for this article.
3. Allow customer service staff the appropriate amount of room for creativity
After all, no two service situations are the same. Elizabeth can be a reflective and passive customer, while Karen does not give the customer service agent a say. Standardising the service concept is important, and creates a good framework for a successful service encounter. However, taking it to the next level and personalising the service requires good situational awareness and the right amount of creativity.
”An excellent customer service agent can recognise the type of customer they are dealing with by the smallest clues. He or she can adapt to the specific situation of that customer, for example by using word choice, body language, tone of voice and product knowledge. ”Friman 2016
Too often, when designing a top service experience, it is forgotten that it is, after all, about simple things. Commitment to delivering a good customer experience is required from management and staff alike. It is easier to start practising service personalisation and creative solutions to situations once staff have been engaged in the basics of service.
Finnish market research company Buenno accelerates its growth and product development with a successful €300t Seed funding round. The funding will be used to strengthen Buenno’s team and develop the technology for its mobile customer experience platform. Gorilla Capital and a large group of experienced growth entrepreneurs will join as investors.
Buenno is a new kind of mobile market research platform that allows consumers to give feedback on their customer experience and enables businesses to collect important information to improve their own operations. Buenno currently has more than 5,900 registered consumer users and its customers include some of Finland’s largest retail and service sector companies.
”The value of measuring customer experience is understood right up to the highest levels of management”
Managing Director Aaku Asujamaa has been working in the market research field for the past eight years and is well aware of the challenges their client companies face. ”The importance of the customer experience has grown steadily over the past few years. The value of measuring customer experience is understood right up to the top management. On the other hand, current solutions for measuring experience are not sufficient. Traditional market research services are complex and slow to implement, while newer customer feedback channels and tools leave the data very shallow. At Buenno, we combine the best of customer feedback channels and traditional market research services. It’s easy for consumers to give feedback, but it also gives businesses in-depth information about their customer experience. Businesses have been very interested in our new service and now with the investment round we can make Buenno an even better service for both consumers and businesses.”
The Seed round is Buenno’s first and will involve a large group of experienced and well-known investors. The round includes Gorilla Capital, Business Finland, Loipposet Oy and six angel investors.
”As a matter of principle, we invest in companies that develop their services in a customer-centric rather than product-centric way. From the very first contact, the Buenno team has shown experience in their industry and a desire to better understand their customers’ needs. This is reflected in the successful sale of a prototype version of the service and the number of customers acquired despite the difficult epidemic situation. Buenno is a significant innovation in the field of customer experience measurement and we are excited to be part of the growth journey from the very beginning”, comments Managing Partner Risto Rautakorpi from Gorilla Capital.
”Our team has worked very hard over the past year and I am proud of how far we have already come.”
””We are building a future-proof platform for gathering customer insights by connecting companies and their customers through the Buenno platform. Our team has worked very hard over the last year to develop Buenno and I am proud of how far we have already come. Our mission is to make customer experiences worth experiencing. This means that in addition to the information we provide, we want to make it truly impactful. The investment round gives us a great boost to achieve our mission.” Asujamaa sums up.
More information:
CEO and co-founder Aaku Asujamaa aaku@buenno.fi +358 50 411 2343
I have yet to meet a company that does not have a goal to increase customer loyalty and improve the customer experience. These are things to strive for, but it is easy to talk about very abstract things. Mapping the customer journey helps us to understand the concrete elements that make up experience and loyalty.
”The customer experience is not a single point of encounter: it is the sum of all the encounters, emotions and images that a customer has of their interaction with an organisation”
– Veikko Törrönen, KREAPAL
All encounters between the customer and the company create a path that the customer winds through when dealing with the company. This path is called the customer path and the encounters with the company are called encounter points. Overall customer satisfaction is the sum of all these encounter points. In order to improve satisfaction, it is first necessary to identify the most important points of contact for the customer’s experience. Customer Journey Mapping is a tool designed to do this.
Customer Journey Mapping
The purpose of Customer Journey Mapping is to visualise the customer journey from the customer’s perspective. At the same time, the different stages of the customer journey, the customer’s tasks and the points of contact with the company are made visible. To help define customer objectives, it is worth interviewing customers so that the objectives are not based on assumptions.
”Defining the customer path is an effective way to understand what makes a viewer a long-term loyal customer”
– Kofi Senaya, Director of Product at Clearbridge Mobile
Start defining the customer path by going through the following steps:
What do you want to achieve by defining the customer path?
What are the customer’s tasks when they buy a product or service from you?
What are the encounter points in the customer’s path when they do business with you?
Which of the encounter points are most important for overall satisfaction?
Which encounter points can be developed to create a specific competitive advantage?
The following questions will help you in your task:
Is the customer receiving the service in the channels they want?
Is the customer receiving service quickly through different channels?
Is it easy for the customer to find the information they need?
Is the customer’s experience consistent when dealing with different people and functions within your company?
We doubled the response rate to our customer surveys. Take these 7 things into account and do the same.
Two things are of interest to all companies that carry out satisfaction surveys: how to get the highest possible response rate and, at the same time, as much verbal feedback as possible.
Response rate is an important goal, but at the same time it is important to remember that customer satisfaction surveys are part of the customer experience. Sometimes these two objectives are in conflict. If you design a survey correctly, you can increase both response rates and customer experience at the same time.
Why improve the response rate?
The purpose of the customer satisfaction survey is to find out how satisfied customers are. If only one in 10 customers respond, you only get a partial picture of satisfaction. It may be that one group of customers is over-represented in the results and another group of customers does not respond at all.
Realistic target liability rates vary depending on the industry and the content of the survey. In general, a response rate of 30% is easily achievable. If you can triple the response rate from 10 to 30, you triple the amount of information available. You will be able to make better decisions and the customer data on which those decisions are based will be more representative of your true customer base.
”The response rate is influenced by many factors: industry, customer engagement, the content of the survey, how it is conducted and whether customers feel the need to answer it.”
Based on our experience, we have found that these seven issues in particular have a big impact on response rates. Focus on these and increase the response rate of your surveys:
1. Choose the right time The right moment also depends on your industry, but it’s usually best to send the survey soon after the customer has been in contact with your company. You’ll get more responses if you send the survey the same day, rather than a week later. If you delay sending one, follow the effect of the time of day and day of week.
2. Ensure the delivery of your queries Email addresses and phone numbers change. Please make sure they are up to date or use an external service. Monitor how well your survey invitations are received. If more than 5% are missed, it is important to correct this quickly.
3. Use the right channel for your customer SMS and email are the most common survey channels. If you’re not sure which method works better for your customers, test it out with a test survey. Send a survey to a small group by email and to another by SMS.
4. Invest in the attractiveness of the survey invitation Pay attention to the title and the content of the message. The message should be quick to read and give the reader a sense of why it is worth their time to respond. Personalise the invitation by using the customer’s name, and say that you would like to hear from them about ”xx store or xx event”. This will make the response feel more personal.
5. Don’t ask too many questions at once Condense your thirst for information and make the questionnaire concise. More people to complete a shorter questionnaire. You can control the length of the questionnaire by using question skipping, so that questions that are unnecessary for the respondent are hidden. Also tell the customer the length of the questionnaire in advance.
6. Provide an excellent response experience An easy and visually appealing survey will attract higher quality responses and more open feedback. Make sure that surveys are straightforward and easy to complete on all devices. If your response experience is top-notch, you can squeeze in a few extra questions without a problem.
7. Test, test and test again It is impossible to say for sure what will work best for your business. So before the final version of the survey, A/B test the different steps with a smaller group of recipients and choose the one that works best.
In particular, monitor these issues during the process: – Which sending time results in the most open enquiry invitations? – Which headline generates the most open enquiries? – How many of those who open the survey will move on to the actual survey? – How many people leave the survey unfinished?
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