A business’ success does not only lie on product quality, but also on how it treats its customers. Thus, customer service continues to be an essential factor for brand loyalty, public image, and profits. Outsourced customer support can take you there!
A good customer service team is essential to the success of a brand.
Did you know that approximately 50% of customers stated that they would opt to using a new brand after one negative experience with customer service? No matter how small or big your business may be, losing half of your clients is never worth it!
While we look at a business as promoting a product or a service, customer interaction plays a huge factor in either amping up your brand or dulling its shine. No amount of advertising, marketing, or product improvement can downplay the impact of customer experience, because customer feedback can spread like wildfire. In businesses, good publicity matters–and rest assured, your customers create free advertising based on their experience!
The Importance of Good Customer Service
Businesses exist to fulfill society’s needs. They provide innovative solutions to everyday problems and fill in what’s lacking. Since many of them always aim to bring something new to the table, it’s natural that many consumers will inquire about the product, or buy the product and have questions about troubleshooting, proper usage, and purchases. Both startups and established businesses must protect their brand and maintain good relations with their customers for brand loyalty.
Wherever you are in the timeline of being a business owner, understanding the significance of good customer service is a must because of its many benefits. Here are some reasons why good customer service must always be a priority:
- Conversion
84% of consumers use customer service as one of the deciding factors in making a purchase, and only 3% say it’s irrelevant. As humans, we want to be treated well, and since we are shelling out hard-earned money, it’s important that all of our queries are answered quickly and with accurate information to guide us in our decisions. Of course, as a business, you have to convert your advertising into actual sales to make a profit, so good customer service is a significant step to ensure this.
- Loyalty
95% of consumers consider good customer service as a key factor to brand loyalty, which is why a good relationship with customers is always worth paying attention to. Brand loyalty does not start and end only with a product a customer patronizes, but it can also have a ripple effect on future products that businesses want to put out. Trust is a key factor that makes consumers buy something, and if they are loyal to a brand, they are confident that whatever future purchases they make will be worth it.
- Free advertising
Nielsen reports that a whopping 92% of consumers trust family and friends’ referrals over other types of advertising. That’s a lot, and it can also go both ways! Good customer service means good feedback, and good feedback means good referrals. On the other hand, unpleasant experiences with customer service can easily spread, potentially staining a brand’s reputation. Given the massive impact of word-of-mouth advertising, businesses can easily take advantage of this free marketing by making sure that their customer service always puts the consumer first.
- A positive public image
Excellence is not 24/7, sometimes there are good days and bad days. However, having established a good reputation in terms of customer service means that customers are willing to let occasional slip-ups go and continue to be loyal to the brand. In fact, 78% of consumers are willing to ‘forgive’ a brand’s mistake if the customer service is good, which means that how a brand treats its customers can be a trusted safety net in case of any mistakes!
- Profits
With the advantages given above, it can be safe to assume that good customer service translates to better profits, and statistics definitely support it. It’s great to be good at handling customers, as Bain & Co report that companies with excellent customer service enjoy 4 to 8% higher revenues than the rest of the market. Treat your customers well, and they will give the love right back to you.
Companies must streamline their processes to ensure their consumers are always satisfied.
How to Deliver Efficient and Effective Customer Service
Customer service overall may appear to be easy: be kind, address the problem, give a polite ending, and boom, done! Unfortunately, there are almost an endless list of queries, complaints, and feedback that arrive on your end, all at the same time. While it’s a good thing that your business is gaining attention and publicity, failure to quickly and properly address concerns can be a red flag to many consumers.
Here are some tips for businesses on how to make sure their customer service is top-notch:
- Know what your brand stands for.
A big part of customer service is knowing what responses to give your consumers, and this is only possible if you know your brand well–what you offer, what the company stands for, and the things that you don’t. Blindly agreeing to all the complaints and feedback that customers give can be good for a while, but the brand might lose its identity if this becomes a trend. As Forbes says, “Stand for Something, or Risk Everything.”
- Know your customers.
In general, we as people love to feel heard, our struggles validated. Of course, this philosophy is also true for customers. Unfortunately, customer service is not just all about listening, because businesses also have to know their target market in order to communicate with them better.
For some, branding and customer service must even go hand in hand because building a customer-centric business model should be the blueprint. Businesses must ensure that the reason their business exists is because they want to cater to a particular niche or demographic, and build their customer service and journey from there.
- Listening is important!
Sainsbury’s heartwarming exchange with a three-year old girl ended with the brand’s tiger bread being renamed as Giraffe bread, the company going viral, and the little girl feeling heard (and creating a legacy in the process). Thus, while companies cannot obviously cater to every single request, this story is a great example of how listening to customers can benefit everyone.
Unfortunately, Hubspot reports that 42% of companies don’t really consolidate and listen to what customers are saying. To add, the same report also states that more than 70% of customers are now more informed than ever, which means that buyers are now more analytical when searching for or trying out products. These two figures are good guiding points for businesses to be reminded that perfecting and innovating their products must be based on customer experience and feedback.
- Acknowledge your faults.
No matter how streamlined your customer service processes are, it’s impossible to be perfect 24/7, especially if your business is huge and there are a lot of parties involved. When mistakes happen, customer service must quickly step in and try to resolve the problem as much as they can. 70% of customers generally ‘forgive’ a company if they can resolve the issue. Prompt and humble acceptance of any faults must be a fundamental element of a business and its customer service.
Digital Marketing and Customer Service
Nowadays, businesses must have a virtual presence. Social media pages and websites for every kind of business exist because the convenience of looking up, getting to know, and reaching out to a business online is incomparable. As a result, the concept of customer service has expanded beyond just telephone calls and inquiries about functionality, to listening to real-time dialogues in comment sections, forums, and other online platforms.
Social media has now become a prime tool for a brand to answer customer queries. From being just an online platform to connect with friends and family, it has evolved into becoming one of the strong pillars for a business to succeed. Through direct messages (DMs), comment sections, and dedicated hashtags, customers can now easily engage with a brand to voice out their queries, feedback, and concerns. Moreover, since these platforms are also echo chambers, other users with the same queries can just ‘react’ to a comment or look up a similar one, which helps social media managers/customer service representatives save time by answering only once.
From an Entrepreneur’s Lens: Good Customer Service Offers Room for Product Improvement
While customer service may be seen as brands assisting their customers, a company that listens to customer feedback also means welcoming improvement and listening to the pulse of the public. Brands who listen to their customers do not only make people feel that they are empathic, but it can also be seen as a survey or checklist of things they need to improve on.
According to Khoros, 83% of customers feel a sense of loyalty for brands who are quick to respond and offer solutions to their complaints. A wise business owner can take advantage of this is another way–not only will their customer service personnel quickly jump to the rescue of their customers, but also use their exchanges as data to create appropriate solutions for future improvements. It can even be an opportunity to create another related product to answer the inconvenience, in case the current product has limitations.
A good business knows that a customer-centered approach is a step towards success.
Customer Service as Part of Marketing
What typically comes to mind when thinking about customer service is a formally written response to a query that starts with ‘Hello,’ and ends in ‘Thank you.’ However, many companies have since innovated their customer service and expanded it to include memes, witty replies, and playful digs at contemporaries. As a result, they draw in people because the next post, comment, or tweet might be something exciting, which in turn increases their brand exposure.
Nonetheless, experimenting with engagement and customer service must still remain consistent within a brand. People love familiarity and consistency, thus a brand’s customer service team must be well-informed and must stick with stringent brand guidelines. Inconsistent brand persona may be jarring–if a brand’s style of engagement is usually formal and suddenly decides to give snarky remarks unlike before, it can alienate loyal customers instead.
Outsourced Customer Support
Good news: your business is expanding! Bad news: your customer service and manpower cannot keep up with the avalanche of customer queries. Some businesses can suffer this dilemma of wanting to expand their horizon, but the costs of expansion, including in the area of customer service, is too high.
To address this, outsourced customer support has become a popular yet affordable option for businesses, especially startups. This service is typically offered by a third-party outsourcing company that will form a team of outsourced agents ready to learn about your company, services, policies, and other relevant information and take on customer queries for you.
The Philippines as a Center of Outsourcing
More than 500,000 Filipinos are now currently employed in outsourced customer support roles via BPO, or Business Process Outsourcing. Given the accommodating nature of Filipinos, their competence and proficiency in the English language, and the low cost of living in the Philippines, many foreign companies are now outsourcing customer service representatives from the country, saving up to 70% less in labor costs.
Moreover, because of the demand for Filipino customer service representatives, the Philippines sees the BPO industry as a booming business, with 15%-18% growth rate as of 2021. More and more Filipinos grab the customer service outsourcing profession and are very well-equipped in different fields including telecommunications, finance, healthcare, retail, travel and hospitality, construction and engineering, and other professional services.
Process Ninjas as a Customer Service Outsourcing Company
Our outsourcing agency in the Philippines, Process Ninjas, believes that customer experience is also a top priority. Their team is concentrated in Asia and offers excellent outsourced customer support services in order to address two things: First, making sure that the queries and problems of your customers are properly addressed, and second, taking off the burden of entertaining customer-related issues so you can focus on improving your product or service.
- Real time Chat Support
Based on findings by PWC, 82% of top-performing tech companies prioritize human-like interaction in the world of tech, which means that real people still offer better customer service than chatbots. For Process Ninjas, companies outsource their customer support to us so we can urgently respond real-time to concerns, offering a human touch to ensure that your customer satisfaction is on top of its game. Moreover, our trusty ninjas can even assist you create comprehensive knowledge bases to streamline your workflow and customer journeys.
- Alternative Customer Support Services
If you want an alternative outside of chat, we also offer ticket support which we manage through any customer service software you are already using. However, these tickets will still be customized by ninjas to add a personal touch, or accurate scripted responses to handle more queries at once.
Take Your Business Further with Outsourced Customer Support
Businesses cannot exist without people. It is important for entrepreneurs to always keep in mind that their audience and consumers must come first before thinking of profits. As such, the lifespan of a business depends on how they treat their customers.
Investing in customer service and outsourced customer support are just as important in investing in the quality of what a business primarily offers, unfortunately it also comes with a price. Thus, companies like Process Ninjas come to the aid of many business owners, entrepreneurs and startups, offering excellent outsourced customer services to take your business further, and allow you to serve more people with what you offer.
For more information, visit https://processninjas.comservices/customer-support/.