If you want to improve the customer experience – and you have limited resources to do so – here’s the one factor that will make the biggest impact …
Speed.
Customers say that a fast resolution is their top priority — whether they want personal help or self-service, found a recent study by NICE inContact. What’s more, almost 55% of customers say they expect you to point them to where they’ll get answers and solutions fastest. They don’t want to have to figure it out themselves.
Fortunately, getting customers the answers and solutions they want even faster isn’t just about increasing staff or technology.
Many companies speed up service by streamlining and becoming more proactive.
Here are four best practices you can try to do this:
1. Nip big issues in the bud
The fastest service is proactive service — when you’re in touch with customers before they even have a question or know something is wrong.
Some companies call it a crisis plan. But there doesn’t have to be an all-out crisis to put people into action after an issue (big or small) arises. If something affects (or will affect) a large number of customers, you want to be quick to alert them and tell them what’s being done to normalize the situation.
The key is to have a plan in place that allows the people who know the most about the issue to quickly align with the people who have easiest access to the largest number of customers.
For instance, if the problem is a delay in production, the operations experts will want to share what’s happened, what’s being done to fix it and how long until everything will be on schedule again with the marketing team, who has the most current customer list and can send an email blast and social media alerts.
2. Know when you miss – and act
The research makes it clear: Customers don’t like waiting. But sometimes, questions go unanswered and issues fall through the cracks because of some internal miscommunication.
You can catch misses — and move toward solutions faster — by creating a system with more back-up personnel and notifications.
One small marketing company assigns at least one person to each communication channel to regularly check that requests and questions have been answered.
They also use apps such as Notify and Slack so they’re aware of mentions in social media — whether those are on their own pages or not — and can respond.
3. Make the easy stuff easier
FAQs, scripted responses and YouTube instructions are vital to better experiences and happier customers.
The key: All of your ready-to-respond solutions must be up-to-date. If email and social media templates, website FAQs and videos are outdated, customers will contact you in other ways and feel like your service is slow.
Companies that do the best at keeping scripted and recorded responses up to date are those that build teams or assign individuals to check and change information as needed. Even better: They alert customers when information is changed so customers know that something is different from what they last saw or read.
4. Get the top to commit, too
The companies that lead the way in fast, efficient service have top-down support for the customer experience. For instance, Jeff Bezos still takes customer calls from time to time at Amazon to show his support for service and stay in touch with customer demands.
If you don’t have full support now, or want to increase it, focus on what faster, more efficient customer experiences will do for your organization’s bottom line. The C-suite likes to see positive growth. Work with sales, marketing and finance pros to show the correlation between better, faster service and profits. Then find a champion who can help you maneuver the C-suite to get support that will trickle down from the top.
