What is the best thing that you can do to increase your word-of-mouth referrals and reduce the churn rate? 

The answer here is to improve your company’s customer service. No matter how great your product is or how skilled your team members are, what your customers will remember is the interaction that they had with your company. If you want to build a great business, then you need to provide impeccable customer service which should also be the heart of your business. 

Over the past few years, customer expectations have grown up at a fast pace. Today, customers get tons of information and choices which makes it harder to retain them to your business or they even abandon a company and look for other options once they face a bad experience.

On the other hand, a positive customer experience drives more sales and loyal customers over time. Optimizing the quality of providing excellent customer service is critical for the success of any business.
Despite providing self-service or customer service through call center automation, users still prefer to interact with a real person and get real-time customer support.

What do you mean by customer service?

Customer service is an act of giving support services to your present and prospective customers. It is to deliver exceptional customer service by exceeding their expectations and providing them more value. 

Customer service outsourcing professionals follow customer service best practices and provide timely and emphatic help that meets all the needs of people at every interaction. It includes providing helpful knowledge and resources, maintaining a pleasant attitude, or valuing the time of users. 
According to the research by Zendesk, 84% of customers agreed that customer service is one of the major key factors in purchasing products.

Why is it crucial to deliver impeccable customer service?

As we already know that products and services have now become more indistinguishable from each other, thus excellent customer service has become a major battlefield for every player in different industries. 

As customer experience now decide the success or failure of any company, customer service has now effectively become a competing factor and various companies are now trying to build an ultimate customer success team. 
Hubspot research says that 93% of customers make a repeat purchase from those companies that offer excellent customer service.

Top 6 Skills of a great customer service team

1. Attentiveness and patience

One of the greatest tips for customer service is to stay attentive to what prospects are trying to tell you but not by directly saying the same thing to them. It is important to stay mindful and pay attention to every feedback you receive from your existing users and try to resolve their queries in the first call itself. 

Your team should always be willing to patiently understand and listen to the problems and needs of customers.

2. Simple and effective communication skills

The ability to provide impeccable customer service by clearly communicating with customers is a key skill as miscommunication can always lead to frustration and disappointment. Your best customer service professionals should practice how to convert complex concepts into simple and digestible terms.

3. Incorporate positive language

The ability to make changes in your conversational pattern is an effective customer service practice. People make persuasions about you and your company on the language that you use. 
It plays a crucial role in making your customers happy and is one of the commonly used customer service best practices. Creating a positive and impactful language can result in growing your customer base.

4. Utilize and manage time in an efficient manner

There is a limit to the amount of time you dedicate to each of your customers. It is one of the greatest tips for customer service as customer service representatives should know how to quickly recognize and solve the needs of people by managing their time carefully.

5. Become a problem solver

An exceptional customer service interaction includes anticipating clients’ needs and going the extra mile to provide additional information or educating the customers on how they can tackle a particular problem in the future.

6. Focus on achieving the goal

The customer service team and its representatives should deal with users on a case-to-case basis and solve the problems of customers on a priority basis. They should achieve their goal and targets daily to keep up with the overall business goal and work towards generating customer happiness.

6 Ways To Deliver Impeccable Customer Service

What does it mean to provide a great customer experience or exceptional customer service to the users who have reached out to your company for help?

1. Get to know your customers and become a good listener

If you want to provide outstanding customer service, then the first and foremost thing is to know your customer. You should have a unified view of your users which will eventually help in retargeting and sending personalized recommendations. 

You can use CRM software to know the behavior of customers and various interactions to regularly update their information at various touchpoints and find vital tips for customer service. 

Becoming a good listener is a skill that can be learned and developed over time. Listening is all about understanding customer messages accurately. Pay attention to every detail such as what customers are saying and how they are saying it. 
Actively listening to customers is to read their current emotional state and their unique personality so that you can modify your response that fits your current situation.

2. Get complete knowledge about your products and services

As a customer support operator, you spend a whole day troubleshooting for your customers which means you need to have expert knowledge about your products which comes under customer service best practices. 

Your customer service outsourcing department should be able to explain the features, usage, benefits, and technical aspects of products to customers. Their job should be to make customers feel like they have got the true value for their money. 

Make sure to amaze your client by recommending features and services from time to time to achieve their goals. This will increase the loyalty of customers which in return expand your upselling opportunities and high revenue generation.

3. Imbibe the correct customer service skills and offer proactive support

Delivering amazing customer service using the right skills should be your primary objective. Your team should be able to handle both positive and negative feedback in an empathetic way and should be able to utilize all the skills and knowledge that they have received during their training process. 

A representative should be able to have effective communication with upset customers and turn them into happy customers. Proactive customer support here is to anticipate the needs of customers and then realize that they might need your help. 

To leverage the usage of your products effectively, you can create short customer service videos and FAQs mentioned on your website or engage with them through chatbots.

4. Provide a personalized method of customer service and quick response to queries

Customers look forward to interacting with a person and not just with a company. Using personalized customer service helps to tailor the level of communication with every customer by sending them individual messages or through direct interaction.

A cornerstone of good customer service is to solve the queries of customers as quickly as possible. The most important thing is to value the time of customers during the online user experience. 

Speed should be the essence of your customer service outsourcing team especially while solving smaller issues for your users. So, always resolve the issues of customers and get back to them with the most suitable answer.

5. Analyze the feedback of customers to improve your process

You can never improve your business process if you cannot measure. This is why it becomes essential to measure the customer satisfaction score by collecting feedback to know better how your customer service team is performing and improving the process of customer lifecycle management. 

You can collect feedback using different methods such as:

• Gathering feedback using pop-ups on your website
• Sending emails to clients to collect reviews and testimonials
• Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and many more can be used to listen to the thoughts of customers and replying them quickly
• You can understand the behavior of users of your website using Google Analytics and identifying how long they are staying and interacting on different pages of your site 
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) or face-to-face video chat will also help to analyze the feedback.

6. Always keep your promise

It is one of the common-sense customer services as you don’t want your customers to feel down. 

For example – If you made a wrong delivery of the product to your customer, then apologize immediately for the inconvenience caused to them and offer them a refund of money or a replacement of the product. This way you can deliver excellent customer service and gain loyal customers.

Conclusion

All the above elements are combined to enable the delivery of impeccable customer service. If you want to stay in the competition then you have no other option but to deliver high-class customer service. 

Only creating customer-centric culture or training your team isn’t enough as you also need to use the right customer service software for better performance and evaluation of results. Great customer service will increase your brand’s reputation and make your users more loyal to your business which is the main customer service best practice. 

You should never treat your customers like another number in a ticket queue but treat them as a part of your business. For better customer-driven growth, you need to humanize yourself as well as your customers.