Good customer service means consumers will return again and again. Just one bad experience can put customers off for life, and they end up telling others not to buy anything or do business with that particular company. Excellent customer service results in business growth, but there is no doubt that customers’ expectations are high. They expect a seamless experience throughout the whole buying journey.
By 2040, it’s predicted that nearly every shopping purchase made (95%) will happen online, so now is definitely the time to make sure your online presence is the best it can be, from your own website to the various social platforms.
Over half (56%) of Brits have switched from a favourite brand they were loyal to due to increased inflation and the cost of living crisis, while one in five shoppers (19%) agree that they can ‘no longer afford to be loyal’. That’s according to the second annual Emarsys Customer Loyalty Index.
The research, which includes data from more than 2,000 UK shoppers, examines how different attributes – age, gender, geography, geopolitics and ethics – affect loyalty in an economic environment suffering from high inflation, fiscal uncertainty and unprecedented political instability. Of those surveyed, 64% have changed their attitude towards loyalty over the last 12 months.
With this in mind, it is not a time of companies to be complacent. They cannot just rely on past custom and need to constantly strive to provide excellent customer service. AI is already playing a big part in this and will continue to do so. By using AI, companies can pinpoint what customers want from their brand and how to improve it.
On the front cover of this magazine, recruitment company, Reed, explained how they used HubSpot to engage customers. They went from manually emailing individual leads to sending automated sequences based on engagement. Those quick and personalised responses are just one way that HubSpot helped Reed connect with their many different customer personas and improve their online experience.
Find out how our three business leaders have provided excellent customer service.
Andrew Russell, Chief Revenue Officer, Nyriad:
Ensuring excellent customer service is one of the most critical steps in the customer journey and paramount for optimising the customer experience (CX). At Nyriad, we believe that in order for customer service to be excellent, it must be provided at each and every touchpoint along the customer journey, but first and foremost – it begins with the customer.
At the core of our ethos is our values. We put our customers first, always – no ifs, ands or buts. We treat everyone fairly, honestly and with transparency. We strive for the highest of quality, we work as a team to achieve our goals and continually seek a better way through innovation.
Our vision is to empower innovators to enrich lives and advance humanity – allowing our customers to focus on solving the difficult challenges that the world faces today – from creating content that delights audiences to developing cures that save lives. We asked ourselves, ‘Is there a better way?’ Can we architect a solution that enables customers to sleep better at night and provide a solution that is performant, resilient and efficient? The answer was ‘yes’, so we set off on our journey to revolutionise the foundation of storage.
The customer journey begins with the architecture and design of our technology – ensuring that we focus on quality and understand how our customers will use the technology to drive their valuable business outcomes – so we can ensure the utmost ease of use and operational simplicity.
From a go-to-market perspective, we made the conscious business decision to be 100% via the channel, so we partnered with world-class channel solutions provider partners that are dedicated to building long-term trusted advisor relationships with end clients. Here, a demonstrated commitment to understanding the end client’s goals, requirements and challenges is key. Ideally, with our partners – we are focused on making it easy for customers to evaluate the latest in emerging and disruptive technologies. To ensure excellent customer service, the relationship cannot end with the technology or delivering it to the loading dock.
The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), among others, refers to this now as the partner experience (PX). Key to PX is that today’s end customers want open and on-going lines of communications with their technology solutions providers, and that must extend to the technology vendors themselves.
Our support services are a big part of what makes the Nyriad experience positive and unique. At Nyriad, we are committed to providing exceptional support and resolutions to help our channel partners and end customers achieve great business outcomes and results.
As CompTIA points out, ‘As business axioms go, few are truer than the one about relationships being everything.’ This is certainly true when it comes to ensuring excellent customer service.
Paul Roberts, CEO, MyCustomerLens:
How do business to business companies ensure their customer service is meeting their clients’ expectations and maximising the commercial opportunities available to them?
Traditionally, firms start by hiring consultants to conduct research to learn about their clients’ needs and also to find out what those clients think about the services they provide.
Consultants will typically interview clients and send out surveys, before writing up their findings in PowerPoint reports, which they present to boards.
This process can take several weeks, or months, by which time, much of the information is already out of date, and the next opportunity to collect feedback will be the following year, when the process is repeated.
This is not a good way to inform service improvements. In the modern, digital world, senior decision-makers need to know immediately when they should be reviewing existing products and services, recruiting new talent and altering pricing strategies.
That is why at MyCustomerLens we set out to deliver a more effective and responsive approach to customer feedback, by developing an ‘always listening’ software platform that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to aggregate and measure client insights.
When looking to find out how clients think, businesses often overlook information that is already available to them on feedback forms, in complaints data and in unsolicited verbal and email comments. By bringing all these feedback sources together, businesses can create a shared view of current client experiences.
Applying AI to these unstructured text comments then provides several benefits. It can instantly discover what clients are talking about, where they are in the customer journey and the sentiment behind their comments – positive, negative and neutral.
Text analysis can also compare feedback against a range of brand values, such as responsiveness, innovation and approachability, to discover why customers feel their service experiences are good or bad.
When your feedback loop is ‘always on’ and constantly looking for new and recurring trends, the absence of a given theme can also be an important signal. For example, if your brand is positioned around responsiveness but your customers never comment on it, it could be a sign your service isn’t as distinctive as you would like.
The process and culture of continuously gathering, analysing and reporting on b2b feedback is called active client listening. When done well it gives businesses a competitive advantage by enabling them to discover and respond to client needs faster than their competitors. When your firm makes the switch from passive to active client listening, you will be well placed to deliver service improvements that positively impact your customers and your bottom line.
Martin Brown, CCO at FM Outsource:
The cost of doing business is rising with fuel, wages, raw materials and energy all continually increasing. This is, unfortunately, resulting in a high number of corporate insolvencies, with levels reaching 1,964 in December. That is 32% higher than the same month in 2021.
As small businesses continue to feel financial strain, maintaining good customer relationships is paramount. In fact, research shows that 75% of small- and medium-sized businesses are seeking to strengthen their customer relations and services to cope with the challenging economic environment.
Small businesses should not underestimate the role customer service has in brand reputation. When we asked 1,000 people for the factors that are most likely to have a positive impact on their perception of a brand, efficient customer service was the most widely cited response, with half (50%) of respondents valuing it most highly.
There is a tendency among businesses of all sizes to treat customer service as an additional overhead, rather than an integral growth opportunity. However, there is a powerful ripple effect that a positive or negative customer service interaction can have on a business’s reputation.
Poor customer service can have a huge impact on customer retention: our research shows that nearly half (47%) of consumers have stopped purchasing from a brand altogether due to a negative customer service interaction. This can be crippling for a small business.
Considering the challenging business landscape ahead, protecting reputation will be critical to small businesses’ on-going success. Not only to retain customers, but also in attracting new ones.
Early-stage businesses, in particular, may not recognise the necessity or value of having a customer service function. They may have experienced some customer enquiries, but not on a large scale yet. This means too often that small business founders take on the role of customer service agent themselves, creating more tasks for their already lengthy job list. Consequently, the business is unable to give customer service the care and attention it deserves.
An outsourced customer service team can fill this role. Having a highly trained and well-prepared team available on a flexible basis offers protection to small businesses. Using an outsourced team means the founder doesn’t need to take full responsibility for customer care or employ and hire someone specifically for the role. Instead, they can enjoy peace of mind that if an enquiry comes in, it will be handled efficiently.
Tech-enabled customer services can also play a pivotal role in small business operations. Using technology – carefully and appropriately – can allow for a greater volume of customer requests to be dealt with in a shorter space of time.
By using an outsourced service, alongside implementing the correct technology, small businesses can give customers the care they deserve to maintain satisfaction and encourage new customers.
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