As a customer support agent, you spend all day troubleshooting for customers, and that means you need to be a product expert. Expansive knowledge of your product is an essential customer service skill. Your job is to help your customers get the most out of their purchase and feel like they have gotten true value for their money.
Make it your goal to learn everything there is to know about your product so you can amaze your customers with timely recommendations for using new features and services.
Attitude is everything, and a positive attitude goes a long way in providing excellent customer service. Since most customer interactions are not face-to-face, your attitude should be reflected in your language and tone of voice. Everyone has heard of the legendary customer service at Zappos. For example, they once sent a best man free shoes the night before the wedding after his order was sent to the wrong location due to a mistake by the delivery company.
Resolving customer queries as quickly as possible is a cornerstone of good customer service. Customers understand that more complex queries take time to resolve. You should, too. That means they want to feel like more than just a ticket number.
Customers want to interact with a person — not a company. How about their interests or hobbies? Can you make them laugh? Your customers are the most integral part of your business, and they come before products or profit. Treat them like they are the center of your world — because they are. Identify what about those interactions stands out, and be sure to include those in your response. Here are two ways you can answer this interview question with examples:. This type of response allows you to express your knowledge of customer service even if you have never worked in a public-facing position.
When using this type of response, be sure to provide specific examples of what the customer service provider did and why it left a positive impact. For example, I recently flew home to be with my father during a serious surgery and had to rent a car. When I arrived at the airport rental desk, the employee informed me there were no vehicles left in stock.
I explained to the rental clerk that it was critical I had a car during my stay and told her about my father. She quickly called another location and asked them to drive a car over immediately. She also upgraded my rental for free. Not only was the clerk friendly and helpful, but she was also empathetic and took every opportunity possible to improve my experience. That sort of impactful experience can make someone a customer for life.
Related: Customer Service Resumes. One day, I received a call from an older woman whose purse was stolen while traveling. Every business experiences a frustrated or upset customer, but the best service teams are able to de-escalate the situation and prevent potential churn.
At the end of the day, the best customer service teams solve their customers' problems. They're tenacious and determined to help their customers achieve their goals. In many cases, this requires agents to be creative and come up with unique solutions to customer issues. As you'll see in the examples below, sometimes excellent customer service means finding a solution that falls outside of normal company protocol.
Image Source. The customer service at ClusterTruck is so seamless, you may not know whether you're troubleshooting with the customer service team or the marketing team — a telltale sign of superior omnichannel support. In one of the emails, a HubSpotter noticed she could get a really good deal on her next order, but during the pandemic, she wasn't able to receive delivery in the area where she lived. The customer service team sprung into action offering her a long list of exact locations she could pick up her order that were as close as possible to her address without leaving the ClusterTruck delivery range.
Another customer service rep chimed in with a map that starred the locations for a visual representation of where she could pick up her lunch. Good Customer Service Takeaway : That marketing email served as a beautiful example where a team could not only engage the customer but delight them, too. ClusterTruck put the flywheel in motion starting by attracting the customer to an offer, engaging them when they had a question, and delighting them with a solution. As a result, the customer sent the email with all of the helpful information to her network who were fans of ClusterTruck but had the same issue.
Now that's brand loyalty in action. Korean beauty brand Ohlolly has made waves in the LA beauty community as a result of their dedication to the customer. The owners describe their business as, "A place where customers were treated like friends. Customer service is at the forefront of OhLolly's business operations. To make the customer experience more personalized, they've started requesting feedback on the brands they offer.
This helps the team curate the perfect selection of beauty solutions for their customers. OhLolly even goes the extra mile to share updates when they restock a beloved brand or add new products to their collection. Our very own HubSpotter, Kassandra Mendes, experienced this first hand:.
Good Customer Service Takeaway: This example shows us that a simple gesture to show our customers that we are actively listening to what they tell us can grow brand loyalty far beyond our initial interaction with them.
Depending on the size of your business, your team can recreate this interaction fairly easily. When you bring on a new product or service, do a search in your customer service inbox for mentions of it.
Then follow up with customers who made the request and let them know it's available. If your company is too large to do this manually, you can export a list of email addresses and upload them into your email marketing system to notify them that way. Either way, the outreach is well worth the reward. AdRoll helps D2C marketers reach and resonate with their audience by centralizing their marketing and advertising activities in one platform.
By spending less time looking for data, marketers who use AdRoll spend more time doing the work that makes the data. We've mentioned before that one of the tenets of good customer service is self-service support. AdRoll's robust help center begins the user's customer service experience with four options to choose from: an intro into AdRoll, getting started with setting up your AdRoll account, FAQs, and an option to browse by topic.
If none of these get you exactly what you're looking for, there's a search bar at the top. Of course, if all those options still leave you lacking, their customer support team is available to help answer your questions. One customer wrote a review about AdRoll on G2 and said this:. The retargeting has helped generate a consistent conversion rate over the last 6 months and their customer service is helpful and super efficient. Good Customer Service Takeaway: Your customer service team doesn't have to provide round-the-clock live support to be a champion of the customer experience.
AdRoll gives us an ideal example of "work smarter, not harder" when it comes to solving customer pain points. With a self-service solution that is easy to navigate, your customers will be just as happy that you saved them a phone call and gave them a tool to find a solution instead. Santa Cruz Bicycles manufactures and sells high-quality off-road bicycles. Its bikes are known for their high-performance and its customers deeply care about the technology that they're riding.
But, the bike's performance isn't the only feature that Santa Cruz customers love. They're loyal to the company because its service and support teams match the quality of its products.
Customers can trust that any problem they have with a bike will be solved swiftly and with excellent service. If you have an issue with a Santa Cruz Bike and come to us with your issue, we'll help you resolve your issue. And, Kyle wasn't just talking about problems with the bike. The company is also focused on removing long-term roadblocks from the customer experience. For example, when the business was first starting out, it experienced a sudden growth. Customers loved the bicycles and the demand for the product rose beyond what Santa Cruz's service team could support.
Agents were working tirelessly and the team's email inbox nearly reached capacity. Recognizing this flaw in its service experience, Santa Cruz adopted customer service tools to aid its support team.
Reps started recording data on customer issues and highlighted problems that were most common with their customer base. They created a shared inbox with an email alias so customers could easily contact the support team. They also created a customer feedback loop so they could collect and share customer reviews with the entire organization.
Good Customer Service Takeaway: When your company experiences growth, it can sometimes create unexpected problems that pop up down the road.
If these issues are left unchecked, they can become a detriment to the customer experience and halt your business's success. Santa Cruz recognized a potential flaw and acted immediately.
They adopted customer service tools to ease the pressure on their support team while simultaneously improving the customer experience. That way, reps weren't being overworked and had the time and energy to provide excellent customer service. Additionally, Santa Cruz used its new tools to conduct reporting as well.
This allowed the company to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction while its customer base continued to grow. Even though more customers were interacting with the business, each interaction still felt genuine and personalized because of the customer data Santa Cruz had gathered. Ride-hailing app Lyft succeeds in the customer service space by making its customers proud by putting its money where its mouth is toward values and causes customers truly care about. For example, Lyft announced its commitment to minimizing the environmental impact of the millions of car rides it provides every day by declaring all of its rides to be carbon neutral, thanks to its voluntary purchase of carbon offsets.
Lyft condemned the executive order, writing in an email to customers:. We stand firmly against these actions, and will not be silent on issues that threaten the values of our community. Wherever you stand on these important issues, it's undeniable that Lyft's customers care about these topics all over the world.
Good Customer Service Takeaway : An important facet of customer service that can be difficult to measure is standing for the values that are important to your customers.
I recently heard from Kristin Aardsma , who works in customer support at Basecamp. She spoke about Basecamp's customer support team -- more specifically, how the team measured success to reduce employee stress and turnover, and achieve better outcomes for customers. Part of Basecamp's solution to solving for the customer and reducing employee stress was creating time in the workday for research, innovation, and creativity.
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