The Learning Center

Today’s global marketplace requires a higher level of customer service and retention than ever before. Experts agree that the kind of customer service required to keep customers and build loyalty includes a wide variety of contact points such as web chat, social customer service, and developing practices like multichannel technology and video chat for customer calls. The newest customer service methods include listening, proactively identifying pain points, and big data to understand customers.

Listening and Engaging

Stash Tea Company Vice President Patrick Proctor says a true VOC program that listens to the voice of the customer and respects customer views, opinions, and feelings about a company’s product or services are the key to today’s customer service success. He says making customers feel like they have been truly heard is the most important element in successfully handling negative customer response.

Proctor explains that a successful response is thoughtful and quick, not reactive or rote. It should include a sincere and personalized apology and thank you. A close second in importance is monitoring the situation after resolution to make sure it doesn’t continue and is truly resolved to the customer’s satisfaction. This kind of service is easier and more affordable with cloud call center services, like Zipwire, with inbound and outbound capabilities, integration with existing customer relationship management systems, and mobile and omni-channel features.

Roasting Your Own Products

Product roasting, as described by Matt Linderman, Vooza founder and former 37Signals employee, is getting a group of people together to review flaws, inconsistencies, even minor issues of a company’s products and services with the intent to galvanize action to correct and improve them. In customer service, this can be bumped out to customers, either by inviting them to do so in social media or on a company website or by monitoring complaints in real time online such as tweets. The value in this is the speed of understanding the problem and the customers’ experience of it to stimulate creative, quick resolutions. So while roasting other companies or your customers like Wendy’s has done recently may not be the best tactic for everyone, subject yourself to a roasting from your customers.

Identifying and Addressing Pain Points

To provide the best customer service requires being proactive and seeking ways to understand how customers use your products and services and what their experience is while doing so. The first step to addressing issues or problems customers have is to identify those pain points. Do this by monitoring blogs of similar products and services, asking customers directly online about problems they’ve had or for product and service reviews, analyzing competitors’ customer service issues by monitoring product reviews and complaint tweets, or asking your salesforce about what challenges they’ve had selling.

Understanding Customers

Understanding customer behavior is more important than ever, and the way to do it, according to Excellent Management Systems, Inc. president and CEO John Weathington, is with big data. He says asking customers what they think about your products or services in focus groups or surveys is almost made obsolete by measuring actual behavior in real time that’s possible with big data analytics. The advances in social media have made it possible (and important) to listen in and understand the conversations that are happening around customer experience with social media analytics. Services like Google’s BigQuery enable companies to easily and affordably measure how customers behave online without adding a lot of equipment and staff to do so.

If your business needs help with customer interactions, let our team at Titan help you listen and engage with your customers, review your own flaws, address any pain points, and understand your customers.