Imagine most of your customers turn into brand evangelists; they like your brand so much that they provide free word-of-mouth marketing and share their positive experiences, bringing you new business and making customer retention easy breezy.
This vision can become a reality if your business makes a point of exceeding users’ customer service expectations regularly.
The key to becoming a household name like many top consumer goods brands and software is to deliver an indispensable product along with stellar customer support. Nearly 3 in 5 consumers state that quality customer service makes them loyal to a brand. 93% of customers would like to repurchase if the service quality was satisfactory.
Setting the goal of exceeding customer expectations ensures a baseline of high-quality CX processes and practices. Therefore, we will look at how to resolve the issues affecting customer service expectations.
What are your customers expecting?
Many organizations carry out regular surveys to understand what customers want in general as well as from specific brands. The results usually boil down to the following expectations:
- Every customer wants to feel valued regardless of the volume of transactions with the brand.
- They want frictionless and seamless customer support procedures, whatever channel they choose for contact.
- Customers want fast responses and prompt action on their problems.
- They want to communicate with knowledgeable representatives who understand their needs.
- They want a friendly human touch.
Issues Involved in Meeting Customer Service Expectations
Although great strides have been made in providing better customer experiences, more than half the consumers, especially in the US, think that companies need to improve a lot. Some of the common problems are:
Maintaining a friendly but knowledgeable demeanor
Most consumers will stop doing business with a brand whose customer service is not friendly, while 46% will drop brands without knowledgeable employees. Unfortunately, only 38-46% of consumers globally feel that they interact with knowledgeable support staff.
It is vital to maintain the morale of contact center staff to remain calm regardless of how the caller behaves.
No single point of contact
Customers tend to get annoyed if their call transfers between departments, and they end up repeating themselves. They want to reach efficient reps on any channel, whether that’s over the phone, email, or social media. They prefer resolution in a single interaction.
Poor experience during interactions
Slow service, long call waiting times, non-personalized stock replies, trying to upsell at an inappropriate time are things that customers rate as annoying behaviors. 79% of surveyed consumers also think that their feedback gets ignored.
How to exceed customer expectations
Excellent customer service stems from empathy being integrated into every part of the brand. Develop a consumer-centric enterprise, and you will naturally begin to exceed user expectations.
Talk to customers regularly
79% of customers don’t mind sharing information about themselves to get contextualized interactions tailored to them to reduce waiting times. Conducting regular surveys, scheduling outbound campaigns for feedback, etc., should be a core part of the customer experience strategy. These functions can be automated using Conversational AI agents so that your human agents are free to take up complex tasks.
Satisfy your contact center staff
Eliminating mundane, repetitive tasks and involving them in more complex tasks to solve more challenging problems can help them feel more motivated and boost their morale. Use quality CRM software and help scale up the contact center using virtual assistants for sending out notifications, reminders, links, etc. They will be naturally inclined to come up with ways to improve CX.
Improve the response time
Customers get frustrated when they can’t reach contact center staff. Sometimes mishaps occur during off-hours. Set up a response mechanism to notify people of their ticket status. Voice bots can handle mundane queries for FAQs, product recommendations, etc. Consider using voice biometrics solutions for contactless authentications.
Accept your mistakes
Despite your best efforts, your business may slip in meeting customer expectations. At such times, acknowledge the issue, and give consumers alternate solutions. Try to make it up if possible by offering discounts or a freebie at their next purchase.
Offer more self-service options
Adding chatbots and voicebots at the proper stages of the customer journey can reduce the burden on your contact center and also enhance conversion rates. This also improves the UX of your product. You can also build a community forum.
Personalized customer journeys
Know their names, and have loyalty programs to incentivize customer retention. Identify the right time for upselling and cross-selling. You can also involve your customers in the product-building process by directly asking them what improvements they’d like to see.
Modern users expect customer service that feels empowering. Try to provide them with as much information as you can while also making it extremely easy to get in touch with a highly responsive agent when they want.