Most companies put the customer first. For some, it's enough to feel good about it, but it's good to know that it costs 5 times more to get a new client than it does to get an existing one. And the second compelling reason to fine-tune your customer care is that a dissatisfied customer usually won't keep the experience to themselves. On average, they'll tell 9 to 15 other people about it. If you take your business seriously and want to make a profit, you should take the best possible care of your customers.
Together with Johana Kučerová, the head of the customer care team at Slevomat, we have put together a list of seven points that are the most important for the quality of customer care from our point of view:
1. Be easily accessible
Your client needs to ask about the details of your goods or services in order to make a definitive purchase decision, or if something unexpected has happened during the delivery of the goods or services. What are the ways they can contact you? And how quickly do you respond on each channel? At Slevomat, we measure everything carefully and look for the fastest ways to respond. Our tips for improvement:
- Have a fast response on email (within minutes, maximum hours) and even faster on chat (within seconds)
- Answer phones as quickly as possible. If you can't at the time, call back as soon as possible
- Don't forget to have good visibility of the contact within your website, wherever the client is located
- If, like us at Slevomat, you really have a lot of questions and suggestions, consider using "artificial" helpers:
- Chatbot. At Slevomat, we are assisted by Chatbot Slávek, which can help us with the assortment, voucher redemption and other questions. We are still training him to be more skilful every day.
- IVR (Interactive Voice Response). Pre-recorded basic information that your clients seek most often, relieved on the switchboard.
2. Resolve queries quickly and completely
Just because you respond quickly to your client doesn't mean you've won. What is important is that the partner is satisfied with the response and that their request is resolved. What to look out for:
- Have you answered all the questions in the message?
- Have you answered all the questions clearly? You certainly can't go wrong by asking this question at the end of your answer.
- Will the customer really have all the relevant information after this email, or will they still need to write to you for details and next steps? Answer in such a way that you don't raise confusion and further questions in the customer's mind. This saves time not only for the customer but also for yourself.
3. Choose the right tone of communication
The person who handles customer requests does not have an easy role. A common mistake is to fill this position with anyone, because after all, it is a "menial job for students". But you need a real pro who can turn even an angry customer into a loyal fan (it really works).
But then choose the owner of these superpowers to communicate with the customer:
- they must be able to clearly and accurately anticipate what the customer might be interested in and what they need to know
- be very empathetic, patient, empathise with the customer, establish trust
- have a positive attitude. As Johana says: "They have to be able to smile on the phone."
4. Approach customers as individuals
At the beginning of our article, we recommended a chatbot or other automated inquiry handling to help you handle a large number of requests. However, we still put the personal touch first.
We ask our customers how they are doing, looking for tailor-made solutions. When we have a moment, we call people to let them know how they enjoyed the experience and if everything was okay. We like to pass on our personal experience - we know our range ourselves, and each of the Slevomat employees has a certain amount of credits to get to know our offers personally. Of course, we actively offer additional assistance to our customers.
In short – we care that our customers know that they are important to us.
5. Prepare the occasional nice surprise
Can you think of a time when you received a nice touch above and beyond the order or service? We like to pamper our clients too. Because it warms us too. At Slevomat, we use the term WOW for that something extra. Wow can be a gift voucher, credits, personal delivery of goods, a flower to work on your birthday. Wow is carefully and carefully selected by our colleagues to suit the customer. Why do we do this? Negative advertising during a bad customer experience gets passed on to a lot of people. But fortunately, this also applies to a great experience, they are happy to share it in their environment too and become our ambassador.
6. Collect feedback
80 percent of companies think their customer care is great. Unfortunately, only a small fraction of their clients think the same. To avoid being one of them, you need to collect feedback. So we ask our clients how they liked the experience; we find out their perception of the quality of the experience or goods and the circumstances of delivery. We do not forget about feedback on communicationwith our colleagues, we are constantly improving this as well, and we need real evidence to back it up. We get feedback by phone, email, automated product review email and directly on the site after the order is completed. We review and evaluate everything regularly.
7. Having a heartthrob on the team :))
Everything stands and falls on people.We choose the best colleagues for such a sensitive place as customer care. We have a sophisticated selection process and because of it, we are a team of heartthrobs who help each other and move forward. At Slevomat, many employees have worked in customer care for some time, so they all know how important and valuable this department is.
Customer care is absolutely key to a great company. Customer satisfaction can make the difference between whether their friends buy from you and the loss of reputation is very difficult to get back. At Slevomat, we put our customers first and do everything we can to ensure that they are satisfied, perceive our offers as reliably high quality and our customer care as a partner that will stand by them in case of emergencies.