Four Major Criterions to meet your Customer's Service Expectations

The term satisfaction is closely related to expectation. Relatively speaking, you only need to exceed your present expectations to achieve customer satisfaction.

For better or worse, the recent years have seen customer expectation steeply climbing high.

Yet, it’s more important than ever for businesses to impress and satisfy their customers. 89% of marketers think customer experience will become the main differentiator in 2017.

Sometimes it’s really difficult to understand what customers want and how to get them satisfied. Each individual has unique preference, but being a customer, all people want a single thing – quality service.

Now what is quality service? Simply put, quality service is something which exceeds the customer expectation. In this blog we are going to discuss about four major customer expectations and how to address those.

Personalize your Customer Experiences

Today’s customers are accustomed to receiving personalized experiences in the web and digital ecosystems. They have grown to expect the same experiences to be infused into their daily and customer service interactions.

They assume that you have the knowledge about the objectives, interests, and challenges. Even sometimes greeting by the first name means a lot to them. Customized service, personalized offers, follow up calls ensure satisfaction– make them feel special.

To begin with, consider these facts.

• 66% of customers say they are likely to switch brands if they are treated like a number instead of an individual.
• 73% of customers prefer to do business with brands that use personal information to make their experience better.

In short, there is an immediate requirement for you to personalize your customer service experiences. A customer management platform lets you collect and streamline all customer information. This also allows you to streamline all the necessary customer responses.

You can access knowledge about customers’ name, contact numbers and background, information on purchase history, and pervious complaints, so on and so forth. You can also access personalized data based on associated contact data and other related parameters.

This helps you instantaneously switch to one-to-one customer conversations and streamline different interactions. You can also cumulate the data into necessary forms.

Initiate Communication through Multiple channels

The business need to keep open multiple channels for customer interactions.

Customers want self-service, digital, voice, and social ways to interact with a brands and its executives — and they expect each to provide a personalized experience. In past three years, the use of live chat and social media communication has increased dramatically.

• 63% of customers said they were more likely to return to a website that provides live chat option.
• Research from JD Power finds 67% of customers now tap social network like Twitter and Facebook for customer service.
• Nielsen has found that 33% of customers prefer to contact brands for information and customer care service using social media rather than telephonic conversation.

So, if you have a multifaceted communication system with people, your customers will be more engaged with the brand. You will have more feedback for improvement and more chances to bring your target customer into the sales funnel.

Manage Quick and Slick Customer Responses

Having quick response to a complaint or a query happens to be the prime concern of a customer. While launching a complaint to the customer care service, people are always in a state of urgency.

According to a survey of social media users by the joint Nielsen-McKinsey venture NM Incite–

• 33% of customers would recommend a brand that provides a quick, but ineffective response.
• 17% of customers would recommend a brand that provides a slow, but effective solution. 

Unquestionably, the demand for quick and effective solution will be stronger than the above two. But, the interesting thing is customers always prefer the brands that reach them within an hour of the complaint or query.

53% of people, who tweet about a brand, expect a reply within one hour. That figure rises to at least 72% for those with a complaint. Whereas, just 14% of customers anticipate a response will take a full day or more than 48 hours.

Create Diligent Follow-up Protocols

The majority of customers like to have follow-up calls. But, that doesn’t mean you can call your customer anytime.

These facts will throw the light on the significance of follow-up activities-

• Odd times are not suitable to call a customer, as it causes annoyance.
• Whenever customers ask to call after one hour, you should call them exactly after one hour – maintain the reliability anyhow.
• Call your customers to ensure satisfaction, even after the purchase.
• Excessive calls, mails and messages result in detachment.

Follow up calls increase loyalty and enrich the brand-customer relationship. Let your customers know that the relationship matters for you and you are incredibly eager to maintain it.

Consistently meet the set Customer expectations

Needless to say, sporadic good customer management could lead to increased complaints. You need to provide the assurance consistently by providing good customer responses.

You can meet and manage these expectations with a customer management platform. In this, you can collect the entire customer data involved in providing personalized services, managing multiple communication systems and delivering prompt response on a single dashboard. You also need to have a reminder system for following-up with prospects.

CRM or Customer Relationship Management software facilitates you with-

• Opportunities to update customer details and call summaries
• A common dashboard to access information easily
• A mutual platform for receiving and responding to feedbacks, social media comments, enquiries, and complaints
• An opportunity to raise unique ticket number for each query, so that executives can follow up with the status of the enquiry
• An integrated system to manage customer relationships to create more happy customers.

Conclusion

Being a very crucial challenge for any customer service executive, ‘customer expectation’ is a never ending topic. Even for the customer it matters more than anything. 86% buyers would pay more for better customer service.

For addressing all those expectations you need a perfect tool to manage information properly and coordinate with other employees. Kapture CRM can help you there.