Why Customer Service Should Be Your Top Priority And How To Do It

What’s important to remember is that poor customer service can directly impact revenue. In this blog post, we will discuss why customer service should be your organization’s top priority and how putting the customer first can drive business.

It's important to remember customer service is not just about handling complaints or questions, it's about creating a positive customer experience from the first point of contact, to the sale and post-purchase. When customers have a positive experience, they are more likely to do business with a company again. They are also more likely to recommend the company to friends and family. In fact, 77% of customers are likely to recommend a business to a friend if they have a positive experience (Social Media Today).

A best-in-class customer experience can drive revenue for your business. One study found that consumers will pay 17% more to do business with companies with great customer service reputations (Nextiva). Businesses that excel at the customer experience often see revenues 4% to 8% higher than competitors in their market (Nextiva). And poor customer experiences can be costly too - 47% of consumers switched to a different brand due to bad customer service in 2020 (Nextiva).

There are many ways you can create exceptional customer service, and while some will depend on your product or service offering, key things to keep in mind are:

1. Seeking customer feedback annually or at various stages of the customer journey;
2. Having a well-staffed customer success team who offer clear and timely communication, who are knowledgeable about your company and products, and who are empowered to make things right for the customer;
3. Streamlining your processes and uniting departments with a CRM system so customer data and communication history can be housed in one place;
4. Utilizing multi-channel communication with customers so you can reach them simply and conveniently.

There are some great tools and technology available to help put your customers first and help your team be efficient. Here are three tools we strongly recommend:

1 – Customer Surveys

Surveys are a great way to gather customer feedback on the performance of your service team, on product offerings, your website and much more. You can get honest opinions on what your customers need and if you’re performing to their expectations. You can find out if there are pain points with customers (i.e. email replies about inquiries take too long) or other areas where there are service gaps. Check out this blog for more in-depth information on why you should conduct a customer survey and some best practices to create one.

Roadmap recently sent out a customer survey to clients. We learned some valuable insights about why customers choose to work with us and areas we can improve. You can read more about that and how to gain insights from your own customer survey in this blog post.

2 – HubSpot’s new Service Hub

HubSpot, the customer relationship management or CRM platform, recently launched an improved version of their Service Hub. This customer service software lets organizations prioritize their customer experience with an easy to use and integrated platform. The new features allow businesses to connect more with customers and helps service teams be more efficient by having information all in one place and connecting to other business departments. Some of the key features include:

• Customer Portal: to keep ticket conversations going between customers and service reps, so issues are resolved faster and with less repetition.
• Live chat and chat bot options that can route the chat to the right person (sales, service) so customers can get questions answered quickly.
• Help Desk: offers a shared inbox that streamlines and centralizes customer communications across different channels (email, live chat, Facebook Messenger) so everyone on your team can see the different messages and can reply to conversations in one convenient place.
• Inbound Calling: allows teams to receive calls to a mobile device and track inbound calls from customers right in HubSpot. This gives your team quick and easy access to customer data and making it easy for customer service reps to reach a resolution.
• Ticket and Help Desk Automation: you can easily set up workflows to ensure high priority tickets get resolved first and fast, eliminating unnecessary manual processes so your team has more time to focus on solving problems.
• Knowledge Base: Allows you to create a library of resources for your customer to offer self service solutions for your products, such as looking up a parts manual or getting steps on how to fix a piece of equipment.

3 – SMS Message Tools

Utilizing SMS messaging or texting your customers is one of the best ways to reach them directly and simply and is often a customer’s preferred means of communication. Text messages also get much more engagement than email: the open rate for text messages is 98% (vs 20% for email) and the response rate for text is 45%, vs 6% for email (Avochato).

Texts can be used for appointment reminders, lead management, confirmation of a purchase, post-sale follow up, and marketing messages. Sakari is a cloud-based text messaging service that can easily integrate into your existing systems (like HubSpot) and lets you manage messages and contacts in one place. You can even add images and maps to your messages. There are many features you can utilize to set up customer campaigns or workflows, depending on your product or typical customer journey:

• Two-way Texting: instantly connect with customers on a more personal level and answer their questions right in the moment. You can send and receives messages with leads, customers and employees.
• Mass Texting: send messages to many contacts at once, saving your team valuable time. There are also options for personalization like customer name, date/time and URL links. This allows you to still send personal messages to customers, but much more efficiently. Sending text messages to prospective clients can raise conversion rates by 100% (Inside Sales).
• Automated messaged with SMS Autoresponders: similar to a chatbot, these ensure every customer who texts you gets a quick reply. You can set up automated replies to certain keywords that are texted or answer common questions, thus saving time for your service team.
• Prospects who are sent texts convert higher than those who don’t receive any text messages (Avochato).

What are the key components of your customer service strategy? Do you have one? If you’re looking for a way to streamline your customer communication, handle requests faster or elevate your service to drive more revenue, we can help. Talk to us about creating a comprehensive customer service strategy or recommending digital tools that can organize your existing processes more effectively.