customer service Archives

How Customer Service Affects Your Brand

High-quality customer service is essential to growing your brand and setting your company apart from the competition. When a customer has a bad experience, you can be sure their friends, families and colleagues will know about it faster than ever thanks to the internet. Customer service is the human face, or voice, of your brand so make the first interaction a positive one.

Customer service is dangerous to undervalue, because bad experiences can ruin brands, sometimes in irrecoverable ways. So before you cut costs by cutting through the customer service budget, think about these ways that the quality of customer service affects the value of your brand.
1. It’s how you’re remembered.
Customers tend to remember their poor customer service experiences more than their positive ones, meaning a bad image is harder to shift. Ruby Newell-Legner, author of Understanding Customers, asserts that 12 positive experiences are necessary to make up for just one unresolved negative one. So aim to get it right the first time.

2. It’s a statement about your business.
Your customer service reflects on your entire business. People assume that if your customer service is good or bad then your product or service is too. As a business owner, you should adopt the same attitude, devoting time and money to your support team just as you would your product or sales. Lowe’s home improvement store makes sure employees are everywhere and eager to help. More than just pointing customers in the right direction, Lowe’s employees are knowledgeable in all aspects of home improvement and can provide personalized tips for customers. The company has repeatedly won awards for its top customer service and satisfaction.

3. Make it easy on the customer.
If you reduce the effort it takes for customers to get in touch with you, you’re simultaneously making it easier for them to purchase from you. Add contact forms on your site and customer service tools in your app. Provide an FAQ page. Don’t make your phone number impossible to find. Place interaction opportunity directly into their hands and you’ll ultimately guide them from interaction to purchase.

4. It’s a profitable marketing strategy.
Word-of-mouth is the holy grail of marketing. When your customers speak favorably and widely about your business, they are doing more for your brand than any advertising can do. Promote your company’s customer satisfaction standards by using customer testimonials and happiness ratings to show just how much you do for your client base. If you can get customers to sing your praises of their free will, you’ve hit the jackpot.

5. Your competitors are always watching.
Undervaluing customer service is a risky strategy because there’s always a competitor who’s doing the opposite. An American Express survey found that a staggering 78% of consumers have backed out of a transaction or failed to make an intended purchase because of sub-par customer service. If you don’t have the tools in place to make doing business with your business easy, customers will quickly find an alternative.

6. It directly affects retention.
Keeping hold of current customers costs considerably less than attracting new ones. Retention matters—big time. On average, loyal customers are worth up to ten times as much as their first purchase, but that worth won’t pan out unless you prioritize customer success. An experienced client who sticks with you means reduced efforts for you in the long run.

For these reasons, you should consider customer service an important part of your training and budget. It’s a vital part of your branding efforts. Your customer service representatives are the face of your brand that buyers interact with, so they need to be the best!

Service with a Smile

Customer service training is one of the smartest investments a company can make…

Ever talked to a phone representative who was anything but helpful? Or asked a retail employee for help only to feel like you are inconveniencing them? As the old saying goes, good help is hard to find.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. With proper training, companies can make sure their employees provide service with a smile—and make customers smile in return.

Customer Service as a Key Value

Consider customer service as an ongoing process, not just a one-time training, similar to the approach used by Quicken Loans. “Quicken Loans’ culture is built on core values that every team member is encouraged to conduct themselves by every day. One key value is serving ‘every client, every time, no exceptions, no excuses,’” says the Quicken Loans Training team. “Our Assurance team, which more than doubled in size in 2012, ensures team members have the skills needed to uphold this by providing ongoing coaching and positive enforcement when team members are speaking with clients. The key to training top bankers is reinforcing their skills and letting them know we care by not only highlighting the things they do RIGHT, but providing constructive criticism when they fall short on delivering excellent client service.”

The company also uses client feedback to provide insight into areas where they can improve. “Any time we receive feedback from one of our clients, we analyze the type of comments we receive for trends that then can be solved,” the Training team notes.

How to Measure Successful Service

To gain a client-based perspective, U.S. Security Associates, Inc. utilizes detailed customer feedback surveys that specifically address levels of customer service satisfaction. “To increase our overall performance, we must be able to identify the improvement opportunities available, as well as the successes we have achieved,” says Jonathan Jones, manager of organizational development. “Measurement is foundational to our goal setting and organizational accomplishment. The primary metrics the company correlates with customer service training include client retention, additional service requests by current clients, and client referrals.

“We also conduct client meetings on a weekly basis,” says Jones. “The client meetings and evaluation process are designed to measure how well our customer service and performance is meeting our clients’ ever-changing needs.”

Committing to Superior Customer Service

Treating customer service as an essential commitment is another way to increase the satisfaction of your customers. At Vi, an operator of continuing care retirement communities and home health care, all new employees receive a service commitment handbook and training is reinforced during the orientation period through classroom learning, online courses, and custom videos. In addition, Vi provides annual customer service training to all employees and offers service refresher training on professional telephone skills, managing difficult conversations, maximizing resident engagement, and resolving resident issues and concerns.

James Edwartoski, executive director, Vi at Aventura, points to the company’s customer service recognition program, which he says was a direct outcome from Vi’s 2010 employee satisfaction survey. “Employees have received this program with enthusiasm, and they feel they have a much more direct impact on how employees are recognized for customer service,” he notes.

Multifaceted Customer Service Solutions

The Rollins Corporation provides its subsidiary, Orkin, with training curricula in which customer service training is not just a stand-alone topic, but is part of the fabric of almost all field training programs. “One of the most successful customer service training programs in 2012 was the Orkin Promise, which was required training for all service employees,” says Training Director Craig Goodwin. “The Orkin Promise was a blended solution consisting of a 20-minute video-on-demand, featuring Orkin’s president and a fully scripted manager-led lesson, allowing the location manager to provide the corporate message while localizing content to meet specific service protocols.”

The Orkin Promise focuses on four areas of customer service that customers said have the greatest impact on their satisfaction and loyalty:

Showing respect
Accepting responsibility
Delivering effective service
Communicating effectively

Jiffy Lube International uses a similarly multifaceted approach to train employees in the art of customer service. “We incorporate customer service into every training course. We try to emphasize the customer, not the vehicle. Changing the focus has helped us change the culture at JL,” says Manager of Training and Development Kenneth Barber. “Jiffy Lube conducts thousands of mystery shops and customer phone surveys every month. The data is collected and tracked monthly, quarterly, and annually.

How to Start

If you want a stronger focus on customer service, start with these tips:

Measure your employees’ level of customer service via customer feedback on surveys, through email or with forms.
Use the expertise of successful customer service-oriented employees, encouraging them to mentor co-workers.
Make customer service a key part of your new hire training, asking all employees to make a commitment to providing a high level of service. Consider creating a form they have to read and sign stating their promise to exceed customer expectations as part of their employment requirements.

Consumers Want Personalization

When a customer walks into a retail store, the salesperson has two choices: simply ring up a purchase, or truly help the customer get what he or she really needs. The latter includes learning about the customer and making customized suggestions, while the former lacks any personalization whatsoever.

There is typically an opportunity to upsell and when done for the right reasons, customers will be willing to spend more than they initially intended. Think about a hotel you’ve stayed at before and upon returning remembers that you liked a certain type of pillow, a specific newspaper and a corner room. This type of personalized experience is becoming more and more common, and certain types of businesses have become very skilled at delivering personalized service.

If your business has not yet embraced this opportunity, you are missing out. According to Segment, which helps companies manage and activate data about their customers. “Shoppers expect brands to remember who they are, whether they’re on a digital channel or in-store, says Peter Reinhardt, CEO and co-founder at Segment. “However, very few companies can actually deliver on these tailored experiences.”

Segment surveyed 1,000+ consumers and found the majority of them were less than impressed by the lack of personalization in their shopping experiences. On average, 7% expressed some level of frustration when their experience was impersonal. The data shows that customers are willing to spend more money, and the companies that make the effort to deliver a personalized experience win.

Here are some findings from the survey:

Personalization drives impulse purchases:49% of customers bought items they did not intend to buy due to a personalized recommendation from a brand

Personalization leads to increased revenue:40% of U.S. consumers say they have purchased something more expensive than they planned to because of personalized service

Personalization leads to loyalty: 44% of consumers say they will likely repeat after a personalized shopping experience

Consumers are becoming more and more demanding, expecting personalized experience with every transaction. 30% of respondents say they expect call center agents to be instantly familiar with their contact history. 40% of the respondents expect to be offered personalized experiences based on their interests, buying behavior, demographics and psychographics.

Customers who have a positive emotional experience with a brand are 15 times more likely to recommend, 8 times more likely to trust and 7 times more likely to purchase.

The Cost of Disappointment

Disappointing a customer with one bad experience can cost a brand dearly. 46% of U.S. mobile customers said they are likely to switch brands after having one bad experience. 64% of UK consumers say they have avoided a brand, whether online retail, banking or hospitality, because of a bad experience in the past year.

Unfortunately negative customer experiences spread like wildfire on social media. Up to 40% of consumers said they will actively promote negative messaging to warn others following their own bad experience, whether that’s telling family, friends or strangers to boycott a brand.

The most staggering number – 33% said they would permanently boycott a company as a result of a negative experience. A significantly lower number of people said they would notify the “offending” company of what they considered to be egregious treatment or customer service.

How to Save Face

70% of consumers report that they expect an immediate response when they submit a complaint. And moreover, they don’t want to be responsible for fixing a company’s mistake.

In the U.S., online retail brands were the most likely to satisfy customer needs, with 96% percent of respondents saying that their needs were met or exceeded.

When customers believe they have put in more effort than a company to resolve an issue, they are twice as likely to tell friends, family or colleagues about the bad experience, and four times more likely to stop purchasing from the company, switch brands, or use the company less frequently.

The Bottom Line

Positive customer experiences with a brand will influence 77% of consumers to return. And those customers will, in turn, tell their friends and family about their personalized experiences. So learn about your consumers’ wants and needs and deliver on them. If you don’t, you run the risk of losing consumers to the companies who are doing just that.

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