Without your customers, your business wouldn’t be successful, so of course you want to treat them well and make sure that you’re addressing every one of their needs. One of the best ways to show your customers you care about them is by making sure that your customer service channels are optimized to serve your customers in a quick, efficient manner.
Of course, each one of your customers will have a different preferred method of contacting you, so you’ll have to make sure that each of your customer service channels is responsive and helpful, whether it’s over the phone, e-mail, social media, or text message.
Here’s more details about how to improve each of your customer service channels.
Voice
For customers who prefer to contact you over the phone, their main areas of frustration are speaking with representatives who can’t immediately improve their circumstances. You can address this by integrating your phone-based customer feedback solutions with other channels to offer agents all of the customer’s information.
SMS/Text
While customers love the convenience of SMS alerts, they hate getting the alerts at a bad time of day. Make sure to only use SMS alerts between 11am and 9pm, and for further information, monitor your target audience’s peak mobile phone usage times to deduce which times are best to send out messages.
Manage customer expectations from the beginning: acknowledge a customer’s inquiry immediately and include an estimated individual response time in your acknowledgement. Most customers expect a correct answer over email within 24 hours, and they also want a clear, brand-aligned email message.
Social Media
Create a social media handle for your brand that’s dedicated to customer service only; this will improve your response time by as much as 43%, double your total rate of response, de-clutter your brand’s main page, and encourage viral marketing. Also, be aware that 72% of customers expect a response to complaints made over Twitter within the hour; while your average response time is likely closer to five hours, realize that your customers are looking for immediate answers.
Your customers are seeking your help using a variety of channels; by optimizing and improving your customer feedback management across channels, you’ll be able to better serve more of your customers.
