5 Steps to Delivering Customer Service Excellence

Negative press concerning poor customer service will have repercussions for your business for some time to come. Never underestimate the power of excellent customer service because when you do get it right, people will be talking about your brand for all the right reasons.

Why exceptional customer service is worth the effort

In a recent customer service survey, 68% of people said that if they receive poor service they would tell their friends and they would do so via social media too. A Facebook user has 155 friends on average and so you can see the damage that could be done to your brand online, and very quickly too.

Customers buy from you for a number of reasons and top of the list is customer service. So just how do you deliver exceptional customer service?

#1 Fast, quick, efficient response

Did you know that the average response time from a brand to a customer with an online query or complain is 12 hours? In today’s world where immediacy is coveted by everyone and anyone, taking 12 hours to acknowledge that a customer has contacted you is woeful at best.

And when customers phone a company, finding their way through a myriad of “press 1 for…” isn’t great news either. And neither is being put on hold.

The first step to exceptional customer service is being responsive to your customer, no matter what channel they use to contact you.

#2 Value customer interaction

The digital era has ushered in many changes – the majority of which are welcome and useful – but it also brought a whole new level of anonymization. Big brands lost the ability to connect with customers, something that many are only just beginning to pull back.

An important part of customer service is personalisation, as well as maintaining a paper trail of communication, who spoke to who and so on.

#3 Repair when things go wrong

No brand always gets it right. But when you do get it wrong, you need to move swiftly to put it right.

Aiming for the highest quality when it comes to customer interaction is the key to exceptional customer service. So when you do get something wrong – the wrong item delivered or it arriving damaged or another kind of upset experienced by the customer – move swiftly and effectively to put it right.

#4 Do the ‘extra bit’

There are some amazing stories of brands doing more than what is expected of them. The restraint chain Wahaca was hit by a food poisoning bug that saw staff and customers fall ill within hours of eating at some of their restaurants. They had to close a small number of their restaurants as a result, for a short time.

The source of the outbreak was traced to a supplier but rather than blame the supplier, they made attempts to contact customers to apologise, visiting one couple in Edinburgh who had been affected and were due to be married within days, as well as continuing to pay staff including extra for the tips they were missing out on.

As a brand, they certainly did more than what was expected of them, salvaging their reputation that could have been severely dented.

#5 Make it an ever-present part of what you do

Customer service should not be solely a mechanism for response when someone orders something or the default response when there is a complaint. It should be a vein that runs through every department of your business.

Because, to put it simply, without customer service your brand will drop lower down the rankings. Salvage your business reputation: polish your customer service from mediocre to exceptional.