Creating An Awesome Customer Service Experience

Being in business is more than just your selling your product or service. What type of experience are you customers receiving from interacting with your brand, are you creating an awesome customer journey with them? 

Today’s blog will show you how to create an awesome customer service experience for the established or new business owner.

What’s Your Mission

As an entrepreneur/business owner your mission should be the key component that drives every aspect of your business. What are your core values and how does that come across in the way you do business.

What is the experience you want your customers to take away from purchasing from your brand? how you treat your customers when they have a problem will speak volumes of how much you truly value them when it comes to handling their issues.

Your mission should be stated within your customer service policy and they should not just be words written on a paper but they need to be followed up with action.

Let’s take Zappos for instance a shoe and clothing company, their customer service policy speaks of everything that they will deliver to the customer.

I love this statement: Zappos is a service company that just happens to sell all the nifty shoes, clothing and accessories. This statement is letting you know service is what they do and who they are.

Here are some of Zappos customer service traits that in my opinion makes their service exceptional.

• Easy to find contact info (their contact info is listed on every page of their website, vehicles and google search sites)
• No Scripts
• No Phone Tree
• 365 Day Return Policy (On unopened packages)
• Free Shipping and Returns
• No Up-selling
• Available 24hrs

Here is an example of Zappos mission, it’s more geared toward creating a great customer experience, the bonus is the product purchased, what an amazing concept.

The Importance Of Your Customer Service Policy

This is where your mission statement should play a huge part, don’t ever copy someone’s customer service policy. Truth is you may not be able to deliver on it.

Your policy should reflect the outcome you want your customers to receive, do you want them to be frustrated and overwhelmed or do you want them to leave satisfied and excited at how you turned an uncomfortable situation into a great experience.

I have been frustrated as well dealing with brands when a problem arised, however when their customer service team was exceptional at handling the situation I walked away thinking wow that was really professional and they really do care about their customers.

When your customer has a problem with your brand and you go the extra mile to correct it they will tell others not only about the experience but how you handled the problem, they are putting your brand before a potential customer by sharing their experience.

A customer service policy should be designed to help give your company

• its identity, 
• what it stands for,
• how it treats its customers,
• and what the customer’s experience should be.

And that’s not something you can just pull out of thin air. 

There has to be some sort of planning to ensure that the customer service policy is up to date. It has to reflect the company’s mission and what it believes in and you do that with careful and careful planning and consideration.

The customer service policy should be simple enough for all employees to read and implement.

How To Create An Amazing Customer Service Experience

If you’re just starting out, reflect on the times when you had a bad customer service experience…

• What was the issue
• How would you have handled it differently?
• What would be a policy you would create around that experience
• How would you train your team to handle that situation?

There are many disgruntled customers who have had a bad experience with a company, this is where you can perform your research by visiting online brands and view the comments to see where the company dropped the ball.

Amazon is a gold mine for customer service issues. Here is where you can get ideas on how you can develop your customer service policy and what you are able to deliver as your business grows.

The goal of any business should be to satisfy the customer and the way to ensure that is having a great product/service and an even greater customer service policy. 

 

 Basic Customer Service Guidelines

This can apply to all businesses, however I want to address this to those with customer service reps.

• Training your reps to handle issues in a professional manner.
• Meeting frequently with your service team to alleviate the same recurring problems that customers have.
• Creating an incentive program to customers who have had more than 3 calls regarding the same issue.
• Updating the customer service policy frequently to adjust to the needs of the customer.
• Making it easy for your customers to contact you (via email, phone, website chat box)
• Customer Service feedback form on your website

You’ve spent countless hours creating and marketing your product or service, don’t let that be wasted on bad customer service, make a commitment to create an awesome customer service experience.