Poor customer service is detrimental to your business because it impacts how customers experience your brand. It could mean that you lose customers, and your bottom line will suffer as a result. In fact, 78% of customers have backed out of a purchase due to a poor customer experience.
On the other hand, if you provide great customer service, customers will reward you by continuing to do business with your brand. It’s been found that 86% of consumers will pay more for a great customer experience.
Exceptional customer service demonstrates that you care about your customers, which results in:
✅ New leads.
✅ Improving your brand image.
✅ Building customer loyalty.
✅ Sustainable growth for your business.
In this article, we’ll discuss how to improve your customer service so that you can satisfy your customers. We’ll also explain how artificial intelligence (AI) can help you do this.
Why Is Improving Customer Service Important?
There are three main reasons why you should focus on improving your customer service:
☑️ Customer satisfaction
Over 50% of customers will switch to a competitor if they have a negative experience with your brand, and 49% of consumers will share negative experiences online.
On the other hand, satisfied customers become brand advocates, spend more money with you, and churn less.
☑️ Customer loyalty and retention
Three out of five consumers report that good customer service is vital for them to feel loyalty toward a brand, and increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by up to 95%.
Maintaining customer loyalty and retention is crucial because it directly impacts your long-term success, profitability, and sustainability. Excellent customer service can help you do just that.
☑️ Maximized revenue
Acquiring new customers to replace those that have left your business can be costly. In fact, average customer acquisition costs (CACs) can be as high as $1,143 for a single customer.
Retaining your customers is far more cost-effective than trying to attract new ones. Providing good customer service helps you achieve better revenue by maintaining customer retention.
8 Ways to Improve Your Customer Service
Now that you know why improving your customer service is important, let’s look at some strategies to help you do this:
1. Leverage artificial intelligence (AI)
Using AI in customer service is an excellent place to start, as it can help you solve customer problems faster and hone in on common issues they face.
Below are three ways you can incorporate AI into your operations to improve your customer service. We’ve listed these use cases from the most basic (using chatbots) to more advanced ones (root cause analysis):
Use chatbots
Chatbots are AI-powered customer service tools that allow customers to self-serve. Over 67% of consumers prefer to self-serve rather than speak to an agent.
Using a chatbot means you can answer basic customer inquiries and questions without them having to engage with your contact center. This frees up your agents to deal with more important customer interactions, ultimately streamlining your customer service operations.
👉 Keep in Mind that Chatbots Are Limited
Remember, chatbots should be used to help customers solve simple, common issues themselves, and they’re not a replacement for human intervention. Your customer service team needs to be available to answer more complex customer inquiries and complaints immediately if the customer can’t get what they need from a chatbot.
Analyze customer sentiment
Customer sentiment is how customers feel when they engage with your contact center. Customer sentiment analysis involves using tools to analyze a customer’s mood as they interact with your support team.
AI-powered conversation intelligence platforms can help you gauge customer sentiment and satisfaction both during an interaction as well as afterward. This can help your customer service teams know what to say to change the way a customer feels toward your brand and how to resolve broader customer issues across your entire business.
Many existing technologies uncover sentiment through keywords. But modern AI platforms can detect words in context for greater accuracy and true customer intent.
Identify the root cause
Many customer service tools will allow agents to manually categorize each individual interaction. This is limited because agents are in a rush to get to the next customer. Some more advanced customer service platforms tell you why a customer is contacting you to complain, but they often use keywords or have to go through extensive training to be accurate. They also won’t tell you what the root cause is that’s leading customers to contact you in the first place.
Let’s say you’re a SaaS provider of cloud-based accounting software. You launch a new remote invoicing feature, and your contact center is inundated with calls about it. You send this information to your product development team to fix the issue, but they tell you there’s nothing wrong with it.
Ideally, an AI conversation intelligence platform would have revealed the underlying root cause: the invoicing feature works fine, but it’s too complicated for customers to understand, so they’re contacting you for help using it.
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2. Use actionable insights
Another way to improve customer service is to use actionable insights derived from data. But you need accurate and complete data to see the bigger picture and know what to improve.
Loris is an AI-powered conversation intelligence platform that analyzes every customer interaction—rather than just a sample like traditional software—and gives you actionable insights into how you can improve your customer service.
For example, let’s say a sample of 10 complaints shows that your refund policy is your biggest issue. This could be a coincidence or because you’ve recently changed your policies. However, by analyzing all your interactions, your data may reveal that most of your complaints are about the usability of your website.
3. Pay attention to your response times
Have you ever waited 30 minutes on a call to speak to an agent or two days to receive an email response from a company? Frustrating, right? One way to improve your customer service is to ensure faster response times.
90% of customers expect an immediate response when contacting your customer support. This means that your first response time (FRT) is an important customer service key performance indicator (KPI) that you should measure. This metric is the time it takes for an agent to respond to a customer’s initial inquiry or complaint.
Here are some practical ways you can improve your response times:
✔️ Implement automation tools: You can use tools like agent CoPilots or email autoresponders to respond to customer inquiries and complaints immediately. They give customers reassurance that their issues are being addressed.
✔️ Prioritize engagements: Implement a ticketing system that categorizes and prioritizes inquiries based on their urgency and complexity. This ensures that critical issues are addressed first and more basic inquiries are handled swiftly.
✔️ Optimize workflows: Whenever possible, try to reduce the number of steps an agent must take to address common issues. You may also want to use macros or AI-powered agent assistance for frequent responses.
4. Empower customers to self-serve
As mentioned earlier, many customers would prefer to self-serve rather than speak to an agent. Delivering self-service options to your customers is important if you want to drive satisfaction and reduce the number of complaints that come into your contact center.
Here are a few ways you can help customers self-serve:
✔️ Develop a comprehensive knowledge base: Create detailed articles, FAQs, how-to guides, and video tutorials that cover common questions and issues. Even better, use conversation analytics to develop your FAQ list by analyzing every interaction.
✔️ Implement chatbots: As mentioned earlier, AI chatbots can handle routine inquiries and guide customers to the right resources. They can also escalate more complex issues to human agents.
✔️ Implement a customer portal: Provide a secure online portal where customers can manage their accounts, view order history, download invoices, track shipments, and update their personal information without needing to contact your customer support.
✔️ Develop dedicated apps: Consider developing a mobile app that includes self-service features to make it even easier for customers to manage their accounts and find answers when they need them.
5. Offer omnichannel support
Over 35% of customers expect to be able to contact a business on any channel of their choosing, and 90% expect a consistent experience across all channels.
You need to offer multiple support channels via which customers can contact you. Meeting your customers where they are is vital if you want to retain them.
Having a central system where all the information about a customer is stored can help deliver a consistent experience. This means that no matter which channels your customers contact you through, your agents already have all the details of the customer inquiry or complaint.
In this way, customers don’t have to repeat themselves to each agent, leading to higher levels of satisfaction after engaging with your contact center.
6. Provide options for 24/7 support
Having a contact center that only operates from Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. doesn’t cut it anymore. Customers need to be able to get support immediately whenever they need it. In fact, 51% of people expect businesses to be available 24/7 to meet their needs.
There are a few ways to provide 24/7 support:
✔️ Live chat: One way you can implement 24/7 support is to have a live chat feature on your website that agents monitor around the clock.
✔️ Social media monitoring: You should also monitor your social media interactions with a listening tool regularly throughout the day and respond as quickly as possible.
✔️ Resourcing: Build a support team that spans multiple time zones to ensure that there’s always someone available to assist customers at any time.
✔️ Outsourcing: You could also partner with a third-party customer support provider that specializes in 24/7 support.
7. Use positive language
Positive language in customer service is all about conveying optimism and a positive, encouraging attitude, even when delivering difficult news or handling complex customer complaints.
Using positive language means focusing on what can be done rather than what can’t. It helps to create a more constructive and friendly interaction between the customer and your agent.
Let’s say your agent isn’t able to resolve a customer’s issue. Instead of them saying. “I can’t help you with your issue,” you could say, “I’m going to transfer you to my colleague, who will be able to help you with that.”
Using positive language in your customer interactions is powerful as it can make customers feel valued and understood, potentially turning a negative situation into a positive one.
You need to provide your agents with comprehensive coaching so that they can improve their customer service skills when it comes to using positive language. You can do this by using recent examples where positive language was used in an interaction.
8. Personalize your customer service
It’s likely that you’re competing against many other companies in your industry. One way to stand out from the rest is to provide personalized customer service. Research has found that 69% of customers appreciate a personalized experience.
Here are two ways you can personalize your customer service:
✔️ Use first names: Always address customers by their names in emails, live chats, and calls.
✔️ Send personalized messages: After a customer’s first interaction with your contact center, it’s a good idea to follow up with a personalized message. Thank them for getting in touch, mention their specific reason for contacting you and what action you’re taking to resolve their problem.
The Most Powerful Customer Service Strategy
The best strategy for improving customer service is to use actionable insights derived from data. However, you need comprehensive data to see the bigger picture and determine what you need to fix to provide better customer service.
By analyzing every single customer interaction in your contact center, Loris provides you with all the data and insights you need to make meaningful changes to your business.
Traditional contact center software only provides you with a sample of customer interactions to analyze, which results in biased and inaccurate data. It would also take a ton of time for your QA analysts to sift through all this data.
By analyzing each interaction, Loris provides you with deeper insights that tell you exactly what to fix to improve your customer service and overall experience.
Schedule a time to talk with our team and learn more about how Loris can help you improve your customer service.
