10 Proven Ways To Achieve Customer Service Excellence [+ Key Skills]

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Customer Service Can Make or Break Your Brand
3. Benefits of an Outstanding Customer Support Strategy
4. Best Customer Service Excellence Meaning
5. Key Ingredients (Skills) For Customer Service Excellence
6. How to Achieve Customer Service Excellence in No-time
7. Let DeskXpand Help You Achieve Customer Service Excellence

Introduction

While building a successful business, every little aspect, from your product to sales and marketing, needs your attention. From that pile, why do you need to prioritize customer experience?

The answer is simple: Happy customers lead to more money, growth, and sustainability. But, you know this already, don’t you?

I am not here to convince you why customer service is essential. I am here to help you prioritize it strategically.

This is precisely what we’ll be talking about for the next few minutes. This article will revolve around the simple ways in which you can achieve customer service excellence. Here’s a quick rundown:

Customer Service Can Make or Break Your Brand

Customer service is where your brand comes to life. Your frontline teams and their interactions with customers make the biggest impression. Plus, it shouldn’t be surprising to know that today’s consumers (specifically social media users) have grown accustomed to getting what they want. Their expectations have risen immensely.

Seven out of 10 customers have stopped doing business with a brand due to a poor customer service experience.

VERINT

The frustration rates in today’s customers are much higher, and they’re quick to share negative experiences online. Through social media, customers can reach a large audience very quickly, and their negative reviews can impact other customers’ decisions as well.

You can only improve sales by continuously striving to redefine your standards of best customer service excellence. Most customers stop doing business with a brand due to one bad experience. Even though customers sign up for a product or service, a good customer experience is what makes them stay. Hence, it has become crucial to support customers on every channel from day one and establish a best customer service excellence trademark.

Benefits of an Outstanding Customer Support Strategy

Customer service experience is a vital cog for businesses of the 21st century. So much so that companies with bad customer service receive a lot of bad press, research reveals that in the U.S.A., businesses lose around $62 billion each year due to bad customer experiences.

Your customer service defines your company’s long-term success. It leads to customer loyalty, higher revenue, and increased retention. It is not merely enough to attain acceptable support; companies must strive to excel! Organizations need to focus on becoming more customer-oriented.

Benefits of Customer Service Excellence

Best Customer Service Excellence Meaning

Zappos built a billion-dollar empire on ways to deliver outstanding customer service. Customer service excellence is one of their company values. Their tagline goes: “Our purpose is simple: to live and deliver WOW.”

Providing good customer service can differ from one business to another. What is considered good service? Is it even possible to define excellence? Well, when you’re talking about service, you can! There’s an acceptable difference between simply providing service and customer service excellence!

Customer service excellence is when you have a personalized, respectful, and smooth approach. Outstanding customer service helps you provide customers with all the assistance and have a perfect customer experience. This approach is not only limited to post-sales support; it also needs to be applied before and during the purchase.

Key Ingredients (Skills) For Customer Service Excellence

1. Be Proactive While Responding

Importance of Proactive Response

If you take the initiative of contacting a customer as soon as a problem arises, you are prioritizing the issue at hand. It also shows that you are acting with urgency and understanding. This type of vigilance is what separates outstanding customer service from the rest.

Go the extra mile to reach customer service excellence. This is when you tick off all the boxes.

2. Listen Actively to Avoid Repetition

It is very frustrating for customers when they have to repeat themselves over and over again just because the service agents are unable to understand the issue clearly. In order to avoid such situations, the best thing to do is listen to the customer carefully.

By doing so, you can give proper attention to the small but crucial details. This way, you can easily find solutions and enhance your customer experience.

3. Have Good Product Knowledge

Just imagine you have reached out to the customer service department regarding some issues. And you explained your issue to the agents. But they are not able to understand your issue properly due to a lack of product knowledge.

Being a customer, you are not going to trust such a brand again. You might think they themselves do not have the required knowledge of the product; how are they going to help you? In such cases, results would not be so good for businesses.

Hence, you should always make sure that your service agents have all the required knowledge of your products so that they can offer timely solutions to your customers.

4. Do Not Make Promises You Can’t Keep

Not keeping your word is the easiest way to lose a customer’s trust. It conveys the message that you do not care about them enough and take them for granted.

It has happened to me a lot, and I can 100% agree with all the customers out there that it does not feel good. So, I was facing an issue with my television network. Therefore decided to connect with the service department.

I explained my issue and asked them how much time it will take to find a solution. They gave me a deadline of 24 hours and assured me that the query would be solved within the given deadline.

But guess what. The problem was not solved and no one even gave me any update regarding the issue. I was devastated and helpless.

You must understand that customers are the ones who run your business. And keeping them happy should be your primary goal. So, work towards keeping them happy, and do not make promises that you cannot keep. Rather, just tell them the truth (it is far better).

5. Maintain a Calm and Composed Attitude

The most basic skill customer service agents should have is to hold their nerves. Offering quality service comes with its ups and downs. Sometimes offering a solution is a piece of cake, but sometimes it is like a roller coaster ride full of thrills.

So, being an agent, you always have to be calm and composed. Because only then would you be able to handle such situations with ease. Otherwise, just imagine a frustrated customer and an annoyed service agent. It would be a warzone where no one is looking for a solution but just for the war.

6. Show Empathy Toward Customers

Customer Empathy Phrases

A company cannot be successful with an apathetic culture. With customer empathy, you can gain a competitive advantage. Ask your agents to put themselves in the shoes of the customers when working on their queries.

Example:

An Amazon customer ordered a PlayStation for his son. When the package was delivered, the customer wasn’t home, so a neighbor had signed for the delivery package, and then left the package outside the customer’s door. Unfortunately, it disappeared. Well, Amazon was not to blame for this mistake. But they were quick to resolve this. They sent a new PlayStation in time for Christmas without charging the customer for extra shipping.

This is an excellent example of customer empathy. Rather than sticking to their refund policy, they chose to do good. And that is what matters the most!

How to Achieve Customer Service Excellence in No-time?

1. Define What Customer Service Excellence Means to Your Brand

We don’t want to push our ideas on to customers; we simply want to make what they want.

Laura Ashley

There is no one definition of excellent customer service. Your idea of outstanding customer service may differ from that of your competitors. You just have to standardize what it means for your brand.

Excellent customer service consists of:

• Meeting customer’s expectations
• Personalizing to your customers’ needs
• Solving customer problems and responding fast
• Recognizing when the customer needs help
• Using tech like chatbots to find out what customers want
• Customer empathy and showing a positive attitude

2. Analyze and Improve

Use data to back up and analyze the performance of your team. You need to continuously plug the gaps in your support process and keep improving your customer experience. You will need many reporting and analytics tools at your disposal to paint a clear picture of what’s working in your favor and what’s not.

When you truly analyze your customer service, you’ll find multiple loopholes and places where you failed to deliver. The following pointers shall help you analyze your service and improve.

I. Can your customers reach you easily?

This is the most critical part of analyzing your existing customer service. Find out if your customers can reach you easily when they need it or not. Make sure that your channels are working fine and that you don’t miss even a single customer query.

II. Is your team clear with your vision of customer service excellence?

Make your support reps understand your idea of customer service excellence and work collectively to achieve it. This way, once they understand their goals they can give their 100% to achieve it.

III. What are the loopholes in your existing support?

Find out the loopholes in your existing support. You can do this by sending a customer survey. Let them give honest feedback and share their pain points. Maybe then you can actively work on solving it.

IV. Fix your mistakes

Not taking responsibility for your mistakes is a surefire way of getting a bad reputation. Transparency is crucial and always guarantees high-quality output.

3. Respond Quickly to Customer

And in order to do so, help desk software’s amazing features, such as automation, and canned responses, and automation, etc., can help you a lot. These features ensure that your agents know the priority of the tickets and are giving the required attention to them.

4. Make it Easy for Customers to Connect

Because if you do not, your customers will lose trust in your brand. As there is no one to help them out when they are stuck. Forget about acquiring new customers; there might be a possibility that you start losing your existing customers as well if you do not make it easy for them to reach out.

So, ensure that you offer your customers omnichannel support and live up to their expectations.

5. Let Customers Solve Their Own Issues

According to a report, 81% of all customers attempt to take care of issues themselves before reaching out to a live representative – across industries.

This stat proves how crucial self-service really is for customers. Also, how big an opportunity it is for businesses to keep their customers happy and cut down on incoming queries at the same time.

By offering self-service options to customers, you give them the liberty to handle their own issues. They do not have to depend on anyone anymore.

Apart from being easily accessible at any time from anywhere in the world, one major benefit of self-service is that it is available 24/7 to help customers.

Hence, it could be a game changer for your customer service if you start offering 24/7 customer service.

6. Upgrade to the Latest Tech

If you want to serve a personalized experience, you’ll need more than just your legacy tools. Firstly, you’ll need an omnichannel tech that lets you manage every channel from a single interface. This will ensure that your customers reach you through their preferred channels.

It would help if you also had self-service tools at your disposal. Customers don’t always want to talk to an agent to get their problems solved. 81% of consumers say they want more self-service options. Hence, your helpdesk or customer service knowledge base software must provide self-help features.

You’ll also need advanced ticketing features like automated ticket registration, ticket assignment, ticket conversion, SLAs, collision detection, email templates, etc. It is precisely where the versatility of DeskXpand help desk software comes into the picture. DeskXpand is help desk software that allows you to communicate with your customers in real time through their preferred medium.

You’ll be glad to know that DeskXpand instantly converts your received emails into support tickets, but that’s not all. DeskXpand also opens up additional avenues of communication through customers’ favorite social media channels. That’s right! Your team will even be able to field direct message inquiries from multiple channels.

7. Include Solving Creative Problems in Your Daily Practice

Around 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, while 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions. That is why you must thrive on solving the problems of your customers and make it a central part of your service workflow.

The Legendary Example of Zappos:

Zappos once sent free shoes to the best man the night before the wedding. This was after his order was sent to the wrong location due to the mistake of the delivery company. This is precisely what I think exemplified customer service is. They won a customer for life, and the story won the hearts and pockets of millions of people.

Always seek to solve customer problems creatively and in a manner that makes them feel valued. Nothing can be more personalized than this. Meet their needs in ways that go above and beyond their imaginations and expectations.

8. Ensure You Personalize Your Responses

80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that provides a tailored experience. Customers always want to feel like more than just a ticket number or a target number. They get furious when they are not being treated as a person and are being batted like a tennis ball by different people.

Similarly, customers want to interact with a person and not a robot. It is part of the reason why many businesses send gifts to their customers on their birthdays. It is not possible to do this for everyone, but companies must go off script and serve a personal touch whenever they can.

9. Empower the Agents Directly Dealing with Customers

Every service agent should know how to solve issues effectively but the ones who are directly dealing with customers need to be on top of their game always. As customers are not going to wait for a solution or be in any position to understand the situation of the agent.

They are looking for answers too quickly. So, you need to empower your agents to help them effectively tackle such kinds of problems.

For example, a customer is facing an issue, and he reached out to your agent. In such a situation, it would be amazing if your agent had the previous history of the customers. This way, they can easily access the required data and can get crucial insights about that particular customer. This is only possible with great help desk software.

Having quality help desk software also ensures that all the customer’s queries are gathered in one place so that your customers do not miss out on a single query and can offer quality customer service.

10. Ask Customers for Feedback and Act on It

What better way to improve your service for customers than to know about their own opinions? You can create surveys, including questions related to your customer service, and send it to them. This way, you can easily get feedback from your customers.

This activity will give you an opportunity to understand the loopholes in your customer service process. Once you get the feedback, you can work on it and make the process better. As these opinions are directly from the customers themselves, there are high chances that it can help you improve their experience.

But remember, taking feedback just for the sake of it won’t do any good. As the fact is, customers do not like these loopholes. And as a business, even after knowing this, if you do not take any quick action, then you are sending the wrong signals.

So, taking feedback is important, but working on them is even more important.

Let DeskXpand Help You Achieve Customer Service Excellence

An amazing experience can turn a satisfied customer into a brand advocate and promoter. Delivering service excellence has a significant role in fueling your company’s flywheel and generating positive reviews and retention. This perspective will allow you to keep the company’s goals in mind as you’ll put customers first.

Businesses must be built around how to deliver outstanding customer service. It is easy to forget the importance of customer service excellence when building your brand’s web presence and marketing your website. I hope the above-mentioned factors will help you deliver truly excellent customer service.

The easiest way to excel in customer service is to drop your legacy help desk tools and adopt the latest technology to serve your customers better. And with DeskXpand, it is easy to get up and running in no time. When a buzz started to develop around customer service excellence some years ago, our experts came up with a long-term and feature-rich solution. With DeskXpand, you can:

• Offer personable services and personalized experience
• Manage your customer from a single interface
• Analyze your support and generate reports easily
• Allow your customers to be in the driving seat
• Enhance the agent’s efficiency and productivity
• Manage all the ticketing information through integrated third-party tools
• Provide support on communication channels of your choice

It is time to ditch your legacy help desk tools. Try DeskXpand now! We are an ISO27001-certified help desk development company trusted by users worldwide.