How to Make Your Customers’ Lives Easier

Collaborative Post

When you are running a business it’s your responsibility to make sure that you have happy customers. Happy customers mean repeat customers and it also means excellent word of mouth and they will spread the word of your business everywhere you go. People won’t be able to stop talking about you or recommending you or telling all of their friends about how awesome your business is and that’s exactly what you want to happen. The problem is that most business leaders don’t consider how they can be making life as easy as possible for their customers and what it would mean for them if they did. 

Making the lives of your customers easy isn’t just about putting on discounts and money off specials. It’s about making sure that you are accessible, communicate if, and available to them when they need you. It’s why most businesses that use the best live chat website service providers are renowned for being the best kind of businesses out there. For example, live chat options will mean that a business is accessible anytime of day or night. When this happens people don’t have to worry about what time of day they log into the website to buy something, because they know that somebody will always be there to answer a question. It’s this level of customer service that’s going to make a difference to your customers and to whether or not your business is a success. So with this in mind, we’ve got a few ways that you can make sure that you reduce your customer effort and make their lives easier when they deal with your business.

• Implement excellent training. One of the best ways to reduce customer effort and make their lives easier is to train the people who work for you. You have to get the cart before you get the horse, and while that saying may not make a lot of sense to you, it will after you listen to this. There is a huge difference between doing your job and serving your customer, and you need to make sure that you think outside the box and do the second one. If your team is trained in customer service then they will feel empowered to be able to help your customers and make their lives easy. Starting with training means that you are making your business customer focused and not profit focused and that’s what people want to see. Of course, profits do matter and you should be there to also make money, but you have to set the groundwork for that to happen because making money doesn’t just happen overnight.
• Get to know your customer base. You have to tailor all of your interactions to your customers if you hope to appeal to them on their level. For example, if your target audience is 18 to 30 year olds, there are certain methods of speech that you won’t engage in and there are certain ways you would relate to them which will likely be more social media based then it will mail in the post. Certain age groups prefer to do things for themselves via Twitter, while other generations prefer to physically speak to a human to get their point across. If you don’t know what your customers would want especially in this digital age now, just ask! Customers will give you huge amounts of respect purely because you ask them for their opinions and listen.
• Solve problems with the ticketing system. It can often be very difficult to solve customer problems that originate in one department other than customer services. If you have a ticketing system across the company, you can raise incidents internally with different departments and enable your customers to see that you are trying to make an effort on their behalf when something goes wrong. Ticketing systems also give you the space that you need to be able to solve a problem without being shouted at, and unfortunately being shouted at is quite common in customer service. A 24 hour service level should be something that you adhere to, and that means if a customer emails you with an issue, you are targeted to solve that problem within those 24 hours. This is going to give your customers more Peace of Mind that you are actually doing everything you say.
• Don’t interrogate your customers when they call you. It can be tempting to ask your customers a million questions when they phone because you want to know how they are doing and whether they are happy with the service that you provide. If you are forcing your customers to go through a myriad of security questions before they can even tell you what the problem is, and if you are asking them to go through a survey at the end of the call, you’re going to put people off. People don’t call a business in order to give their opinion and less it’s a complaint or there specifically giving feedback. So don’t beg for it. Yes there has to be a security process if you were hoping to gain access to our customers information, but do you really need to know their inside leg measurement with every single call? Probably not. Keep it succinct and make sure that you have tailored everything including your security questions to make life easy and less painful for your customers. To be able to reduce customer effort you can introduce voice recognition systems. This way, if customers have to call your business regularly they will just be able to verify themselves with their voice message that they previously set up.
• Have a dedicated complaints line. It’s often the case that customer service agents get yelled at when things are going wrong. It’s how people vent their frustration. If you have a dedicated complaints line with the Bank of customer service agents on that line it means that you have preempted the customer behavior and prepared your agents accordingly. Those who are dealing with customer complaints can be put through special training specific to ensure that they are able to keep up with how to answer complaints on how to handle them. When you do this, you make your customers’ lives a lot easier and give you agents the chance to resolve a problem and know how to do it.
• Keep investing in employee training. Your employees have to know the answers to the questions that customers are going to ask which means that you have to be aware of what the customers’ needs are to the point that you can answer any question they are thrown up with. There is nothing more frustrating than calling through to customer service of a business but nobody can provide the answer and people get passed from pillar to post. This is how customers give pull feedback! Empowering your customer service agents by training them to ensure that they have all the answers to hand is a good way to make sure that you keep your customers and your employees happy and both are very important.
• Continue to analyze your metrics. Ensuring that you are measuring your customer experience metrics will help you to ensure that you are giving the levels of satisfaction you are aiming for. As with anything in your business, continuous analysis is going to help you to learn whether you are doing the right thing and whether you are investing your money in the right way. Take the time to make sure that you are looking at the metrics from top to bottom and you are doing it regularly enough that you understand exactly what your customers need. If you don’t keep up with your metrics you’re not going to know whether or not you’re doing the right thing for your customers.
• Ask your customers how they would best like to be contacted. Do you imagine your customers want regular phone calls from you to find out how you are doing? Because if so, you are doing it wrong. Some customers want to be contacted via text message where others want to be contacted via phone. You should ask customers on day one of their interaction with you how they would like you to contact them. Once you know, stick to that and don’t deviate.
• Always greet your customers by their names. Did you know that you can connect both your database and software together so that you can identify your customers by the phone number they call in on? When you do this, you offer a personal and much more targeted experience that can make the customers feel special. People love it when a business understands who they are and what they want, because it shows that you are doing your due diligence for your customers. Hooking up this kind of software can make a very big difference in your customer interactions.

Customer service is not just a part of your business. It is an art and it takes time to get it right. With these tips, you can take away your customers’ effort and make life easier for them, which makes life easier for you.