Enhanced Customer Service: Asking the Right Questions for Quick Solutions
Customer service & support is moving at a faster rate today than it ever has. Customers and their demand for faster resolution of complaints drive the reason for this faster rate. A study has found that 60% of the consumers/ clients expect a reply within an hour of posting their complaint. In today’s world, the brand of a company is being held to high standards.
The market today demands brands to revamp their customer care strategies. Brands are required not just to be equipped with resources and strategy to respond to the queries of customers, but also to resolve them in a timely fashion. Customers define whether a business is going to survive the hyper-competitive market conditions or not. Hence, organizations that do not adapt and realign their strategies to suit customer needs will be left behind sooner or later.
Delighting customers is of the utmost priority when you are seeking to differentiate yourself/ your company from your competition. Meeting customer expectations is always a top priority for businesses in any industry. Attaining customer satisfaction is a big issue to be addressed across industries. This is because, the rate at which customers reuse the services of a company, defines the loyalty of customers for the company, and this in itself becomes a measure of success for the company.
Firms are trying to fill the experience gap for customers. The experience gap is usually termed as the gap between services a company is offering and the services a consumer needs/demands.
The major services offered by e-commerce companies include:
- Warehousing
- Transportation
- Freight forwarding
These three services form the core of any e-commerce business across the globe. These services help companies in the e-commerce industry to reach new customers in different geographies and ensure the safe delivery of goods or products in a timely fashion. Having an efficient logistics partner, thus, helps e-commerce companies to enhance customer satisfaction.
Customer service is meant to add value to the services purchased by the customer. Customer satisfaction can be attained by adding quality and value to the core services purchased by the customer.
When customers enter the support portal of a company, they need to be asked the right questions, to gauge their exact requirements. Asking the right questions thus becomes vital in the customer care/ support portal. An efficient support system should take into consideration the time required for accurate deduction of the problem, and tries to resolve it as per the requirements of the customers. Such actions and services by firms go a long way in gaining them customer loyalty.
“The single most important thing is to make people happy. If you are making people happy, as a side effect, they will be happy to open up their wallets and pay you.” — Derek Sivers, Founder CD Baby
We can safely assume, that today customers demand to have precise and timely delivery. To meet these demands and at the same time gain the loyalty and trust of consumers; customer service becomes an essential tool. Customer support/ service can ask the right questions and assist organizations to form relationships, provide real-time information, solve problems, and keep the customers posted on the resolution of their issues. Hence, investing time and resources in enhancing a company’s customer support/ service portal can bring numerous benefits. Some of the benefits of enhancing customer service/ support are as follows:
Improved brand image
Normally bad ratings arise when the customers think they have been provided insufficient customer service. Strong customer support makes the brand appear appealing and convincing on the market. This is because customers offer positive and uplifting reviews of the support provided, and hence of your business.
Delighted consumers intimate others
A strong business model backed by an efficient customer support system ensures that your clients remain happy for the foreseeable future. Happy clients often refer to the business they are delighted from to friends, coworkers, and partners. Thus efficient customer service initiates a chain reaction of knowledge sharing and spreads the brand’s name.
Customer satisfaction and loyalty
If customers have a good experience with your company, there is no need for them to go searching for other partners in the industry. Hence, efficient customer service enhances a businesses’ ability to retain customers, by providing value-added services. Effective customer support also helps companies to gain new customer bases and reach great heights in a short period.
Having the right partners, helps a business elevate customer satisfaction as well as increase profitability. Third-party customer service aggregators can assist an e-commerce company in freeing up their time and resources, which can be employed to focus on providing better services and manufacturing better products. The free time also allows companies to focus on their strategies and work towards their vision aggressively. Owing to the advantages of improvement in operational efficiency and optimization of their supply chains, many e-commerce organizations are opting to collaborate with third-party customer service aggregators.
By employing effective services backed up by efficient customer service/ support, businesses can increase their market value along with boosting their revenues greatly. In businesses, systematic logistics and supply chain management is important to ensure smooth and healthy growth. Companies need to devise smart and accurate plans since they are responsible to take care of their customers’ needs.
The organizations planning to scale up their business or operations must focus on improved customer services, which is possible through effective handling of customer queries and resolution of their issues. With the advancement in technology and easier availability of internet-based software, businesses are adopting the latest hi-tech software, which can help in reducing the time spent on picking up, shipping, tracking the placed orders, and delivering them to their final location.
A product delivered in a systemized and timely way can bring in more customers, which are loyal. This can further increase the popularity of the brand since happy customers tend to notify regarding the same to their peers. Offering an enriched customer experience through efficient handling of customer queries and timely delivery of the products is the best way to ensure that your business stays a step ahead of your competitors.
“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.” — Jeff Bezos
Setting up a dedicated customer support/ service department may be costly and straining in the beginning, but it will surely pay off in the long run, by allowing you to gain customer loyalty and trust. Businesses need to undertake such tough tasks and perform them with vigor, to achieve new heights. Hiring a third-party aggregator firm prevents a business from spending time on issues and problems associated with customer support/ service and concentrate on enhancing and improvising their key deliverables. This gives an e-commerce business the breathing room to formulate strategies and pave ways to grow their business as per their vision.
