When companies begin to look for customer service solutions, it’s often because there are major issues they need to solve. But oftentimes, these issues are intangible things such as a general lack of efficiency, a sense of ineffectiveness, a need for call deflection and other matters that seem hard to quantify. The benefits of customer service might seem hard to measure at first.
After identifying concrete and intangible challenges, the next step for companies is to find a way to resolve those issues and ultimately achieve customer service success. This certainly won’t happen overnight, but the process is worth it when you consider the benefits of quality customer service for your customers as well as your company as a whole.
Here, we describe the characteristics and benefits of excellent customer service and cover how to measure them.
What Are the Benefits of Good Customer Service?
Let’s explore some of the top benefits of customer service excellence for the customer, agent and business — and how you can measure them:
Increased Customer Service Efficiency
An efficient process is one that requires little input but yields maximum output. Improved efficiency in a customer service environment means that you empower your customer support agents to do less and help more. The advantages of this are increased productivity, higher-quality customer service and a stronger sense of job satisfaction. After all, how many employees want to work harder and produce fewer results?
Using Kustomer, agents can use shortcuts to type a complete sentence with just a #hashtag, while quick keys allow them to use the keyboard instead of the mouse. With these tools, some agents can handle multiple chat screens while others are better able to process emails more quickly. Additionally, the Kustomer timeline surfaces all customer interactions on a single screen, preventing the need to bounce back and forth between different systems.
All of these elements lead to a more efficient and productive workforce. Organizations that demonstrate improved efficiency can track improvements through customer satisfaction metrics like faster resolution times and an increase in the number of conversations each agent handles.
Greater Customer Service Effectiveness
Increased effectiveness means making it easier for agents to excel at their jobs. This involves providing agents with the right customer service training, tools and resources to successfully resolve customer issues and offer personalized support.
Companies that increase customer service effectiveness realize benefits through improved customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, faster case resolution times and higher customer retention rates.
When supplying your agents with the proper tools, you create a seamless experience between the agent and the customers they are interacting with on a daily basis. This leads to an overall better experience for customers, limiting issues and increasing positive word-of-mouth advertising at no cost to the business.
Kustomer’s actionable context cards allow agents to do things like issue refunds directly from their screens and easily route conversations to other agents who can provide the right type of assistance, streamlining their interactions with customers for maximum efficiency and effectiveness.
Improved Customer Deflection
Companies that can deflect easily, avoidable customer support conversations free up agents’ time for more complex issues.
This can be done by providing resources like an easily accessible knowledge base or FAQ section which deflect simple questions like the company’s hours of operation, store locations and refund policies. Even an AI chatbot can address immediate needs before transferring customers to a live chat with a skilled agent when needed. Additionally, proactive outreach capabilities allow agents to address customer concerns before they arise. An example might be sending a notification to all customers in a certain region that an impending storm system may delay shipments.
Not only are these self-service resources beneficial for customers, who can get immediate answers with very little effort, but they also take a burden off of customer care agents who then have the bandwidth to handle higher-level issues. Organizations that successfully deflect customer support conversations witness the benefits of good customer service by seeing a lower number of new cases and more favorable customer effort scores (CES).
Enhanced Satisfaction and Loyalty
The ability to give or receive exceptional customer support can boost customer satisfaction as well as agent satisfaction (ASAT). All of the above benefits of customer service help establish a more loyal and content workforce as well as a community of happy customers, both of which are critical to business success.
Brand advocates are more likely to spread positive messages about your company to friends and family members, post glowing product reviews or employer feedback, and offer sustained support for your company. New employees and customers are more expensive to acquire, so facilitating a great employee and customer experience should be a top priority. Metrics for measuring success in this area include CSAT score, ASAT score and net promoter score (NPS) as well as customer and employee retention rates and churn.
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Insights on Customer Service Satisfaction
In addition to the more obvious advantages of customer care success, such as a bottom-line boost and increased word-of-mouth reach, there are also benefits of evaluating customer service experience and performance.
Customer service and satisfaction are incredibly important components of business success. Prioritizing customer experience throughout your support set-up seamlessly provides satisfaction . Those are more likely to potentially become loyal customers for a business’s wide range of products and services.
Catering to your clients’ needs ensures that any issues, troubleshooting or problems are more likely to be resolved seamlessly. Looking at strategies to implement such as conversational support can be beneficial for your overall business. If your customers have the ability to effectively interact with human support this will create a personalized experience.
Not only does better customer service, and optimization of that service, get you repeat customers, it also increases your business reputation. Word-of-mouth advertising can have a substantial positive impact on a business’ reputation, at no additional cost to the business. Customers will often talk about how a company’s service and resolution skills to others will likely affect one’s chances to use your services.
In addition to having a great rapport with your customers, striving to provide good customer service is also a chance to boost employee morale, which in turn, impacts the effectiveness they bring to the customer service team. Supplying excellent customer service should be connected to a company’s values and mission.
Proper data and analytics can ensure that you are improving the right customer service areas as well as getting rid of your company’s approach to customer service interaction. By evaluating customer service performance, you can understand what current methods are effective with your customer base. You can also identify areas of improvement and what areas need more attention.
Who Benefits From Good Customer Service?
The answer to this question really is that everyone involved benefits from excellent customer service. If you think about it, what is the purpose of good customer service if not to create more satisfied and loyal customers, happier and more successful agents and a healthier bottom line?
Building a strong rapport with your customers is essential to a successful and thriving company. Not only do current and future customers benefit from good customer service, your business will gain a competitive advantage and generate repeat business.
There really are benefits of providing quality customer service for the customer, the agent and the business as a whole. In many cases, when one aspect is improved, all stakeholders will experience the positive impact. The results of good customer service and the advantages of service quality improvements can often be felt instinctively, but they can also be quantified with some of the top customer satisfaction metrics.
Maintaining good customer service standards involves tracking KPIs and monitoring important customer service metrics. Armed with insights like CES, CSAT, net promoter score, sentiment analysis, resolution time, call abandonment rate, resolution rate and customer retention, decisionmakers can implement data-driven, customer-centric changes and continue monitoring the results.
Now that you’re familiar with some of the key benefits of a good customer service solution, find out what specific tools and features you should be looking for in our buyer’s guide.
