Ways to Make Customer Friendly Support

Your Competitive Advantage

1. Provide customers with choices in every interaction
The old days of routing a customer to a single phone queue for any
request will quickly kill any brand loyalty or advocate referral.
The best businesses provide a direct chat box on their website, Twitter
and Facebook requests addresses, as well as email, phone and website
alternatives.

2. Think "pull" marketing rather than "push" for all

services
This means providing such delightful and personalized service that the
customer is pulled in for upsells and becomes an advocate. Pushing
customers with special sales, repeated marketing jargon, and
promotions will quickly weaken brand loyalty and increase churn.

3. Staff all customer interactions with experienced

people
The people you select to interact with customers defines your brand
credibility.
Customers quickly detect intern usage or outsourcing to unfamiliar
cultures, and will share their reactions through social media, rating sites,
and personally. Lost growth can quickly exceed current savings.

4. Never say "no" or "dead-end" a customer request

Always provide a positive next step or a request for feedback, with active
follow up included. We have all received the "do not reply" email or been
refused access to the real decision maker.
If your company can't satisfy their special request, be prepared to connect
them to a competitor who can.
5. Use technology to personalize and expedite
requests
How many times have you been asked to repeat information when you
interact with multiple people at a company?
With today's technology, every business should know your name, phone
number, and transaction history when they answer the phone and pass
you to the right contact.

6. The customer's view of usability is the one that

counts
Usability means adapting to the user's background, rather than the user
adapting to your changes for efficiency.
Changing the sequence of your online ordering process will frustrate and
confuse current customers, so test on all constituents, with feedback,
before making "improvements."

7. Set up online forums for customers to help each

other
Most people feel good if they can help someone else, and customers who
are advocates usually give better answers than your technical people.
The forum staff should always be watching, to initiate or supplement
answers, implement solutions internally, and reward contributors.
Today bad customer experiences, whether unnoticed or resolved poorly,
will jeopardizing your entire brand image. Consider the experiences of
United Airlines a few years back in handling a broken guitar, or more
recently Comcast's handling of a service cancellation request.
The solution is to set the norm with positive reviews and too many
delighted customer stories to challenge.
Although the technology is getting better and better, there is no substitute
for well-trained people with the passion, conviction, and authority to
anticipate and resolve any situation.
It's time to take a hard look at what more you can do to build a positive
emotional relationship with every customer, and entice them to pull
everyone they know away from competitors.

Customer Experience
Customer experience represents the overall emotional journey
throughout the buying cycle from the moment a customer discovers a
brand to the point of purchase and beyond. Customer experience
includes every piece of content they read, every conversation with the
service team, every interaction they have with a product.
It’s also a good time to clear up a common misconception: customer
experience and customer service are not interchangeable terms.
Customer service represents just one slice of the total experience and
refers to the direct interactions that a customer has with front-line
employee’s customer success teams, sales reps, tech support, etc.
Customer experience on the other hand, measures overall customer
perception based on the sum of every touchpoint they interact with
directly or indirectly. This includes preconceived notions someone might
have about a brand as well as direct interactions with a human rep,
marketing communications, press mentions, and more.

Customer Experience as a Competitive

Advantage
Customer experience has become a major differentiator across all
industries.
Conversocial’s State of Customer Experience Trends 2021 report found
that 22% of customers said they consider a great experience to be more
important than price.
According to Zen Desk, brands that prioritized Customer experience pre
pandemic are already at an advantage. Companies with mature Customer
experience strategies are more than six times as likely to exceed customer
retention targets than those that haven’t made Customer experience a
priority.
Slow movers risk falling even further behind as customer expectations
continue to rise and brands invest more into the technology and training
that enables them to compete on experience.
Great Experience = Increased Loyalty
The real advantage of Customer experience is keeping customers happy
so that they keep being customers.
You’ve probably come across these oft-cited stats:
Most of your business comes from your existing customers
It’s cheaper to market to your current customers than chasing after new
ones.
If an organization cares about its reputation and wants satisfied and loyal
customers, they’ll invest in Customer experience.
Good Customer experience not only helps organizations retain customers,
but it enables them to leverage their reputation to attract new ones.
But customers are more impatient than ever. While customers are happy
to stick with solutions that work for them, they won’t think twice about
jumping ship when they run into trouble. In other words, you need to
continuously earn their business. Once they’re gone, it proves difficult to
regain their trust and have them return to your product or service.
Winning back customers is an expensive effort. If companies don’t stay
ahead of the curve, products and businesses will fail
Customer experience is much more than excellent
service and competitive prices. It’s the foundation for building and
sustaining a successful brand. But leveraging Customer experience as a
competitive advantage depends on great data, a customer-centric culture,
and technology that empowers the entire team to deliver a quality
experience.