Online Customer Service: 16 Data-Backed Ways to Improve It

Read our research report about building teams that deliver exceptional CX in growing business. On the other hand, you can achieve all this success, and one bad customer service experience can wipe most or all of that brand equity away. But, there is a way to recover and avoid a negative customer service experience altogether.

Sara is a Los Angeles-based tech writer for Business.com, Business News Daily and Tom’s IT Pro. Be generous, and treat customers as you would want to be treated. Answer a customer’s message or call quickly, followed by swift action. Cloud phone service does away with physical hardware, helping to save space.

Why Customer Service is Important: 16 Data-Backed Facts to Know

In fact, customers should be prioritized over products or revenues. They should be treated as the most important part of a business, simply because they are. Learn to keep your ears open because you might just discover things even your best employees don’t know. Listening could prove the difference between solving, or not solving brand issues. Customer service today must be one that truly connects on a deeper level.

• Sit down with the key players and get the facts before you formulate a response.
• Ensure the quality of your support and adherence to business rules via SLAs.
• Things are easily misinterpreted by email, so it’s important to be extremely careful.
• In most cases, service agents are the lowest paid people in your company, they work ridiculous hours (24/7) and have to deal with unhappy customers.
• Use authentically positive language, stay cheerful no matter what, and never end a conversation without confirming the customer is satisfied.
• For ski season, they’ve created a new AR filter that allows users to virtually try ski goggles.

Olark integrates with many third-party business platforms, including Salesforce and Magento, to streamline customer service with your company operations. That’s why it can be a good idea for brands to use a separate social account to offer social media customer service solutions. For example, Hootsuite uses @Hootsuite_Help, which is run by the support team. Choose only customer service solutions that can help you leverage the power of social networks like Freshdesk. With this powerful tool, you can seamlessly integrate your social media channels to elevate online customer support straight from your helpdesk.

steps to elevate your brand with social customer care

Having good organizational skills plays a huge role in improving customer satisfaction. Often, there will be simultaneous issues that require your attention, and you won’t be able to take care of them at once. However, you can prioritize each case according to the immediate need of each customer’s problem and the order in which you received their ticket. A Net Promoter Score is another way to learn about the customer experience in a qualitative way that will make the analysis process more efficient. The NPS can measure a customer’s opinions, attitude, and overall perception of your business in contrast to a binary question requiring a yes or no answer. For example, you can ask customers how they felt about the purchase experience by gauging it with an NPS.

These skills can help to convey a human touch even when text is your only tool. 33% of customers cited “repeating yourself or information to different support representatives” as the single most frustrating part of customer service. Sending in-app communications when users are primed for engagement.

Solutions for B2B

Proactive customer service is about offering support before an issue arises, and online channels are uniquely effective for this. While phone remains the most used method for customer service, its popularity has been declining for years. Meanwhile, more than half of consumers prefer some form of online communication. And that number is only growing, according to data from Gladly.

Even if it’s starting your support response off with “Thanks so much for reaching out about this,” it can help to defuse a potentially tense situation. Your contact us page is the first place customers go for answers on your website. See contact us page examples from top companies for ideas on how to design yours right. It may be tempting to hide your contact form or phone number on a page a few clicks deep to try to steer away additional support volume.

My LiveChat

Make your social customer service hours of availability clear. Direct them how to reach other customer service channels in How To Handle Online Customer Queries the meantime. Many businesses moved online in 2020 and are struggling to provide quality social media customer service.

As you approach the situation with a calm, clear mind, unaffected by the customer’s tone or volume, their anger will generally dissipate. To enhance your team’s conflict resolution capabilities, enroll them in online workshops and practice role-playing. Besides My LiveChat’s free plan, the company offers four paid plans, which eliminate the My LiveChat branding. The lowest-priced plan, Starter, costs $15 per month for one seat. Its free version supports 10 users, 30 chats and audio calling. It offers a free, 21-day trial that supports an unlimited amount of agents.

Train your team with customer service etiquette

Good software should get out of the way so you can provide the best customer support possible. 71% of CEOs cited human capital as the top source of sustained economic value for companies. These decision-makers consider training to be more important than brands, customer relationships, and products. They expect you to quickly attend to them at their every need, without any delay.

Social media customer service brings key benefits to your brand and customer experiences that make it worth the effort to implement. ClickDesk is a live chat app you can use to connect with people reaching out to your brand on Twitter. Using a private interface, customer service agents can resolve customer support issues in real time. Your social media customer service channels are great places to share educational content. For example, you could create a how-to video or best practices blog post. It’s all about helping customers learn how to get the most from your products.

Let customers know they’re being heard by personalizing your replies and perhaps even following up with a hand-written thank you note. Addressing them by name affirms you’re taking their concerns seriously. Another way to ensure customer satisfaction is to monitor social media sites and respond to any questions or issues that might arise there. This approach demonstrates other ways your business is dedicated to customer satisfaction. It also helps keep unhappy customers from voicing their displeasure on highly visible places like your social media pages.