Customer service can make or break a business. With excellent customer service, you can quickly grow a loyal customer base that can provide you with steady revenue for years into the future. With poor customer service, you may never see repeat business. The key to successful customer service is engagement. If you can properly engage your customers, you are more likely to produce positive outcomes. Below are five tips you can use to drive customer service engagement.
Create Customer Service Specific Social Media Accounts
Today’s digital world is very different than the customer service environments of the past. As such, you need to be prepared to engage with customers on many other digital platforms. One of the most important of these is social media. Social media is one of the places where consumers express their concerns about products and services.
Social Media is Key
You should be prepared to provide customer services over platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. One good idea is to have separate social media accounts for your customer service efforts. Different team members can operate these than your main accounts, mainly used for marketing purposes. This way, your social media manager won’t be overwhelmed, and your customer service representatives can focus more squarely on solving customer issues.
Invest in BDC Training
You can’t expect employees to know how to best engage with customers to provide them with excellent service on their own. Some training will be required. You may be at a loss on how to create such a training regimen. Thankfully, you can obtain the services of a BDC, a business development company.
For example, BDC training for dealers in the automotive industry teaches the sales personnel working at car dealerships how to better engage with customers in different settings, including at the dealership, online, and by phone. If your company lacks the professional touch regarding customer service, seeking out BDC training may be an excellent solution.
Personalize Customer Engagement
Customer service fails because of a one-size-fits-all approach that leaves individual customers with particular circumstances and issues feeling alienated. Some companies think simply publishing a Frequently Asked Questions page on their website is part of customer service. Rarely will such a FAQ solve anyone’s issues.
Tailor your Service
Instead, you must engage customers on a one-on-one basis and ensure their service is tailored to their individual needs. This requires some extra effort and human resources. There will need to be an equal exchange between a service representative and that consumer. However, if the customer feels like they were listened to and treated like an individual, they will be more likely to leave pleased with the provided service.
Try to Build Relationships
The best customer engagement strategies are the ones that see past the first interaction. If you want to keep that customer buying your products or services for the long term, you are going to need to focus on engaging with them in a way that can build a long-term relationship. This can include communications sent out by e-mail or physical mail.
It can involve contacting that customer to ensure that their previous customer service experiences were satisfactory. It can be through an app or a customer loyalty program that gives them an incentive to keep buying your products. Eighty-four percent of those that joined loyalty programs used them to make a redemption.
Track your Interactions and Learn from them
Customer engagement should not be performed in a bubble. Instead, the feedback that is received should spread throughout the entire organization to help improve the business. Sadly, this isn’t often the case. The same customer service department may receive the same complaints daily without the company making the substantive changes needed to prevent those issues from happening again.
Fast Results
Ensure data is collected from all customer service engagements and essential information is always passed further up the chain to those who need to hear it. Overall, successful customer service requires robust engagement strategies to work. Make sure you train employees on how to engage with customers in a way that will leave them satisfied. Doing so can help produce a solid customer base that will give you the revenue you need to succeed far into the future.