Exceptional Customer Service: how to achieve it?

Customer service is a crucial part of every business, both small online stores and big organizations. Companies, which are incapable or unwilling to improve their customer support, tend to lose customers, both new and loyal ones. People also talk about exceptional customer service. Do you know what it is? Well, I’ve found some key components contributing to setting an exceptional customer service apart from excepted or average one, do you want to check whether we have the same answer? Let’s read my post and decide 😉

What does Exceptional Customer Service Mean?

Exceptional customer service is considered as the highest level of customer service, in which all of the criteria of evaluation exceed customer expectations. In other words, an exceptional customer service must be a lot better than the average or expected one.

Note that there is no standard that can be exactly applied to every customer service. Also, the criteria may change with the time; what have been acceptable five years ago might not be acceptable now. As a result, it’s not easy to define exceptional customer service. One of the best ways is to rely on the statistics and actual experiences from customers.

According to the Global CX Wakeup Call Report published in 2015,

• 35% of customers felt disappointed because of sluggish response time.
• 30% said that the admission counselors have weak
• 29% said that they received improper or conflicting information.

Basically, if your company can provide a customer service that reduces these customer’s disappointments and increase the level of satisfactions at the same time, you’ll have a better-than-average customer service. And if the negative signs are much lower while the positive ones are much higher, you’re on the road to reach an exceptional customer service.

Key Features that Define an Exceptional Customer Service

Easy Accessibility

An exceptional customer service is, of course, cannot lack an excellent customer support team. When someone calls a company, what he/she desires is an immediate response from the customer support team, in other words, an easy accessibility. This results in a requirement that service needs to have enthusiastic admission counselors who are always available to answer any question or concern from customers.

Proper Troubleshoot

Having enthusiastic admission consultants is just the necessary condition. The sufficient condition is that they must be functional, in other words, efficient in work. For this reason, an exceptional customer service means handling issues and problems accurately, or at least, be able to give an appropriate plan of action.

For example, a customer calls an automatic pet feeder supplier due to unable to run the device. The counselor, who is responsible for this kind of breakdown, should stay on the phone with the customer until the problem is solved. If it remains, the company should send a technical staff or a repair-person to the customer’s house to fix it.

Highly Understandable

Excellent communication and language skills in customer service are very important. The consultants should listen carefully to what customers require. The answer or solution to the problem need to be easy to understand, not just understandable. One simple and effective way is using common terminologies, which most customers know, instead of abusing technical vocabulary.

How to Become an Exceptional Customer Service?

Excellent Training

Training is one of the key factors to accomplish an exceptional customer service. Both managers and employees have to practice in various aspects, including time management, knowledge, teamwork, technical skills, and so on.

Besides, don’t forget that products need to be high quality together with long warranty and trusted guarantee policies. It’s also important that marketing, promotions, and discounts need to be taken into account. Briefly, the more seamless experience you can offer your customers, the more sales you can get.

Rising Above the Rivals

To achieve an exceptional customer service, standing out from the statistics is not enough, but you have to stand out from your rivals. I take eBay as an example. They’ve been qualified for the PowerSeller status because of receiving the feedback of 98% positive or higher. For 99% of businesses, this is what they always dream.

However, to be truly exceptional, you cannot just be exceptional for your industry. If, for instance, an eBay customer also purchases from other PowerSellers, then there will be no big difference between eBay and their competitors in the eye of this customer.

Be Responsive

There is nothing more regrettable than non-responsiveness to a customer who is seeking for assistance, whether an issue solution or discovering more about what you’re delivering. As I said, it’s critical to react rapidly to all the requests, communicate with easy-to-capture details and give the correct response.

In case you have nothing to say because you don’t know the correct answer, don’t forget to send a calling back message (keep in mind that you’ll call, not your customer). Having a responsible response is always better than doing nothing.

Never Stop Fixing the Mistakes

Continuously attempt to give an olive branch to resentful customers, regardless of the possibility that they already posted their negative feedbacks. Offer them something for free. Send them a sincere apology with the highest politeness and kindness.

Whether you acquire a forgiveness or not, feel happy. At least, they may tell others about the story of your apology and friendliness. This way, you have a good opportunity of recovering your business image. Furthermore, this strategy would keep your customers returning.

Conclusion

“Practice makes perfect.” We all know this quote, and we all agree that it’s so true. In the business field, practice means training. In my opinion, training is not just about learning new things. In fact, it’s also about constantly seeking to improve. Review what went wrong and find out how to become better. Put ideas into practice and never stop acting!

As you see, an exceptional customer service is not a dream that is impossible to make it come true. Why don’t you start turning your customers into big fans and putting your business into a big success? I hope that this post provides you with enough information to define exceptional customer service and how to grab it. Thank you for reading! Have a good day!

 

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