Perks of a good customer service and strategies to maintain good score
Introduction:
- Customer service is to satisfy customers by resolving/addressing their queries.
- Art & science of feedback forms help you know what your customer thinks of your product.
- NPS is loyalty score that you get by your customers and their ratings.
- Grievance management is trying different methods to make your unhappy customer happy and loyal.
- First call resolution is resolving a customer’s problem in the first call.
- Turnaround time is getting back to the customer’s problem in a minimum time.
5 Importance of customer service:
5 Importance of Customer service can increase your sale tremendously.
Satisfied customer is the best strategy.
If your customer is satisfied, you don’t need any other strategy, your customer won’t leave you.
In this section, you’ll learn about Five Importance of customer service:
- Art & Science of Feedback Forms
- NPS is Loyalty Score
- Grievance Management
- First Call Resolution
- Turnaround Time
All these techniques can be a gamechanger for your organisation.
1: Art & Science of Feedback Forms
Feedback forms are very important for the growth of your sales. This is both, art and science.
According to Bill Gates:
We all need people who will give us feedback.That’s how we improve.
This is a very simple yet true statement. We all need people who gives us feedback.
Customer’s feedback helps you improve your products and services.
Your product is anyway a product but if you’re servicing, then that’s also a product.
For example: Uber penalises its drivers if they get too many negative feedbacks or downvotes.
Always keep your customer in the central position. Your customer should run your company.
Few of the benefits of feedbacks are:
- Helps you measure customer satisfactio
- Helps to improve customer retention – customer retention means more revenue
- Satisfied customer will stay with you
- You will detect areas where you should improve
- Provides data that helps taking business decisions
- Positive customer feedback can help acquire new customers
Perfect moment to win the client back and increase his level of loyalty, is what feedback forms give you.
Mr.X shared that whenever a customer was not satisfied with their service; he gives him something extra and gets his loyalty back.
In this era of social media, customer doesn’t believe in commercial advice, they believe more on the social media reviews of your product.
For example: For Airbnb and Zomato, feedback forms are the second most important pillars.
How to create a feedback form and what ways you can get feedbacks?
- Website
- Social media
- Online purchase
- Hard copy
- Chatbots
- In stores
- Polls
So on and so forth, there are many ideas for feedback forms.
Golden statement:
Feedback is the breakfast of champions
The best way to look back is to get feedback
2: NPS is Loyalty Score
After tracking the feedback, this is the best strategy to get feedback.
N – Net
P – Promoter
S – Score
Types of customers that you’ll get:
- Detractors
- Neutral
- Promoters or advocates
When you take a feedback, there is one way to it that you will learn in this strategy.
If you take ratings from your customer with question “How likely are you to recommend this product to your friends and family”, with their answer, you’ll understand what kind of a customer they are. You can gauge it as:
- 9-10 – Promoter, they will promote and praise you.
- 7-8 – Neutral, they will neither praise you nor say bad things about you.
- 0-6 – Detractor, they will only say bad things about you and will damage your brand.
With this, you can have an estimate of your NPS Score.
NPS score = Promoter – Detractor.
For example:
- Out of 100 of your customers, if 60 are your promoters and rest of the 40 are detractors (neutrals account to 0 automatically).
- Hence, your NPS score is 60 – 40 = 20.
Just like rice is the staple food of Bihar and South India, aloo paratha is the staple food of North India, feedback form is the staple food of a good organisation.
Customer feedback surveys help you predict customer retention rate. The better your NPS score will be, the better will be your sale and marketing ROI. This is the most accurate methodology.
Front offices/reception of all 5-star hotels showcase numbers like 8.7, 8.2, or 9.1…these numbers are actually their NPS score, telling how many people are recommending them.
This is simple and universal. Every business can implement this.
For example: Aggarwal packers and movers has used it well. On the basis of feedback, they taught their employees to take of the slippers, wash hands while shifting. They even prioritised shifting temples with clean hands and naked feet, kept considerable distance with women on the basis of feedbacks only.
Contactless delivery, the most famous form these days, is also an initiative taken after customers’ feedback. Brands who have adopted this format are McDonald’s, Swiggy, Domino’s, Amazon, BigBasket, etc.
3: Grievance Management
If a customer is upset with your brand/product, your responsibility is to make it up to them and that process is called grievance management.
How is grievance management done?
- Talk to the customer
- Listen carefully
- Confirm the decided solution
- Give something back
- Offer them a discount on their next bill
- Give them a gift voucher of your product
- Put yourself in their shoes
Rule: When you can’t solve it, find someone who can solve it.
- Record complaints
- Arrange feedback calls – a quick follow up phone call
- Customer satisfaction score
- Take them seriously
- Cost of retention is always lower than acquisition
- Follow-up
- Manage score board
Golden Statement:
People don’t care how much you know but they know how much you care.
The most important thing is your customer’s experience. If the experience is good, you can sail through it.
4: First Call Resolution
It is important for small businesses to understand this concept and even more important for big businesses as you can implement it.
First call resolution means ensuring that the customer doesn’t have to call repeatedly for the same problem.
Keep a track of customer service performance metrics.
A good First Call Resolution (FCR) rate gives you more satisfied customers, improved customer loyalty score, and more sales from existing customers.
The companies that have measured their FCR rate for one year, have increased their revenue by 35%.
First call resolution doesn’t imply to just calls; you can monitor them via:
- Chatbots
- Website
- Social media platforms
Things you should implement are:
- Alert/callback system (These are basic technologies and you can get vendors everywhere. If you don’t know how to do it, then it doesn’t mean that you can’t do it.)
- Ensure FCR at all touchpoints
- Leverage it to improve policies and refine goals
The most important thing for you is to find common issues for delayed resolutions by giving proper training, educating the agents. The training of your employees should be such that they don’t even have to transfer the call and they can be able to resolve problems of other departments as well.
Give realistic experience to customers. Don’t tell them to wait for 30 seconds when you’re going to make them wait for 5 minutes. Don’t tell them that you’ll resolve it in one day but not replying to them for a week because that irritates your customer.
To get an average or estimate of this, you can use the following method:
Total no. of calls resolved in first attempt / total no. of calls x 100
For example:
- Calls resolved in first attempt = 1,000
- Total no. of calls = 10,000
- FCR Rate = 1000 / 10,000 x 100 = 10%
You never get a chance to make your first impression.
5: Turnaround Time
Turnaround time refers to the time you take to get back to the problem and give a response.
If your turnaround time is improved, you’ll be able to resolve customer’s problems more efficiently.
Do You Know?
Roughly 45% of consumers will roughly reject your product if their concerns are not addressed quickly.
If you are not able to give a first call resolution, then it’s important to have the following:
- Fast turnaround time
- Reduce waiting time
- Reduce average hold time
- Respond within 24 hours on email
- Trained manpower
- Knowledge and competence
Remember:
Keeping queries unresolved for long is suicidal.
To ensure performance of your team, you can do the following:
- Incentivise your team
- Explain negative impacts of not meeting timelines. Tell them their KRA and KPI and if they don’t do the work within the timeline, you won’t give them incentives.
- Information access to the team so that they can resolve the problem in one phone call because the time they take to look for an information can make a customer impatient.
A satisfied customer is an unpaid promoter.
Even if you’re not paying the customer but your customer is satisfied with your service, they will automatically become your promoter and will go around praising you, which is good for your business.
Note Down:
- Solve customer problems efficiently.
- Implement customer service strategies to make your customers happy and satisfied
- Keep a track of customer’s issues