Benefits Of Customer Service Jobs To Building Relationships With Clients
It’s an unfortunate fact that you will lose a few customers during the lifetime of your business. Some of the reasons are out of your control; perhaps they were lured by a better product or service offered by a competitor. Or, they simply moved away to a new country. But, more often than not, they were scared off by poor customer service.
In fact, the Customer Experience Impact 2016 report revealed that 89% of customers pull the plug when their needs are not satisfactory taken care of. Remarkably, it seems that they place a higher value on experience than price. Research shows that 55% of customers is willing to pay more if they received superior customer support.
The new generation of customer service representatives face the challenge of more empowered consumers. It’s been called the age of the consumer, characterised by digital connectivity, a vast increase in choices, and shifting expectations.
The above eye-opening statistics show how customer service and business success are now inextricably bound together. When connecting with clients, businesses should care about more than just selling. It is vital to also build a strong relationship with your customers as well. Like the legendary management consultant, Peter Drucker put it: “the purpose of a business is to create a customer.”
It is true that a business’ customer service strategy should include the basics: provide information about products and services, take orders, and respond to customer complaints. But, beyond that, your business needs to position them as a trusted partner of the customer. Do this right and you will be able to:
- Increase customer retention
- Establish a positive reputation
- Get more satisfied customers
The Role Of A Customer Service Department In Your Business
By identifying your customer care priorities, you can improve the way your customer service representatives engage with your customers. Below are three ways building, nurturing, and managing a strong connection with customers can contribute to the effectiveness of your organisation.
Creates Value
Customer service helps to enhance the customer’s experience of your brand and product. A good customer experience requires their involvement at different levels. Engagement can be physical, emotional, and sensorial. It’s important to remember that the customer is not buying a product or service, but rather an experience. An example from Technology Innovation Management Review demonstrates this best: “the value of a cup of coffee enjoyed with a friend at a coffee shop might be greater than the value of a take-out cup of coffee.”
Builds Trust
All relationships that people build are based on trust, whether in the workplace or in their personal lives. Customers will only conduct business with you if they trust you. Often, the customer service department is the first point of contact between your business and the customer. Even having a contact centre is a sign of trust as it shows customers that you are easily reachable. But, as soon as a customer service team member picks up the phone, they should show genuine care and personal attention, respond promptly, be truthful and be open to all customer complaints.
Provides Quality
Having your products speak for themselves is not enough to influence the customer’s view of the quality of your business. It’s also important to set and maintain high-standards of business performance. If your customer service team excels in what they do, they will be able to help create a repeat customer base for your business. Your brand can build a reputation for quality by investing in the right team and technologies that streamline customer service.
How Contact Centres Can Help Build Customer Relationships
To ensure that your business provides an optimised customer service, it’s important that your customer relationship management strategy (CRM) includes a multi-channel service plan. Gone are the days when contact centres operated on telephone calls only. Business can now attend to the needs of their customers as efficiently as possible via instant chat, email, SMS services, and social media. All of these channels can be managed from a centralised office. A contact centre provides the following benefits to customer relationship building.
Customer Feedback
Connecting directly with customers will enable your business to understand how customers perceive your product, support, and brand. These insights can be applied to improve aspects customers are dissatisfied about and keep the areas where you shine operating efficiently.
Big Data
Customers want special treatment when they interact with brands. Collecting customer information such as their names, contact details, demographics and preferences will allow you to personalise your communication with them. A customer is more likely to feel connected to your company when they are recognised as an individual and receive advice based on their personal needs.
Multilingual Support
Many customers prefer to conduct business in their home language. A contact centre that employs multilingual team members will be able to assign a suitable agent to assist a consumer. The result is often greater consumer satisfaction, as they are not only serviced in their own language but assigned to the appropriate agent much quicker.
Track Consumer Trends
Social messaging platforms are expanding their offerings to third party service providers. They do this to establish themselves as the frontrunners for new communication channels and experiences. While businesses can find it difficult to keep tabs on these trends, customer management outsourcing can help them upgrade their customer service to new communication methods.
Expert Skills
A skilled customer service team member knows how to make customers feel wonderful about the help they received. However, it could take many interviews and lots of training to get the perfect candidates on your team. Fortunately, customer management outsourcing can provide you with the expertise to run your customer service department successfully (and at a lower cost).
Customers are a business’s most valuable asset and by forging strong relationships, companies can succeed in keeping them loyal. There are many ways to develop this strong connection, with contact centres as one of the most cost-effective ways. Building a customer relationship takes time and effort but the benefits can be great.