written by Kaushal Sarda
It all comes down to great customer service experiences
Mitch Lieberman recently wrote an insightful post on the value of positive customer service experience for a business so as to establish long term brand loyalty amongst their customers
To succeed with all customers, social and more traditional, companies need to create and maintain consistency of experience across all channels. A complete interaction experience goes well beyond just listening to your customer. It branches out to action, enablement and empowerment. Not only do companies need to learn how to interact well with customers using all channels; from the phone to social media, they also need to ensure experiences for the customer that deliver real value to the customer in exchange for time, attention, actions, information, and anything else that companies want from customers.
Some of the key points that he puts forward in the post are:
- A customer’s perception about a business is mostly based on a sum of his and others interactions
- Service related experiences form a majority of most customers overall experience with a business, as those happen more frequently
- The customer are more emotional and susceptible to getting influenced during service interactions as they actively seeking help
- It is important that a business treats each customer interaction as a way to add value to a customer
- It is also very important to treat each interaction as an opportunity to increase the customer’s trust for the business
- There should be a consistency in the quality of customer interactions across all the touch-points ( phone, face-to-face, social channel)
- Employees have to educated about the value of every customer interaction and have the adequate power to fulfill customer needs. The end goal is to ensure that every interaction results in the customer being satisfied
- All customer service interaction need not be initiated by the customer. Customers are hugely appreciative when a business understands them well enough and can preempt need for help and reach out from their own
- The business needs to invest in the rite set of collaboration tools to connect employees so that they can reach out the rite person to solve the customer’s problem
I think the best approach to establish long term brand loyalty amongst customers is to make them the star of their own show. What i mean by that every business should identify the bigger / cooler thing in context of the industry they operate in and help their customers become awesome at that. So if your Canon, then you should try to use every customer interaction to help your customers become great photographers.
Customer service interactions can be a great way to achieve this objective. This is because the major part of association of any customer with the business is post him buying their product or service. So a customer will remember a business more based on his interactions around customer service. Also it is more likely that the customer will remember most customer service interactions as that’s when a customer is really in need of help. Hence positive customer service interactions will play a key role in customer’s become an advocate and brand loyalist for business.
Kaushal Sarda’s recap of Mitch Lieberman’s post is really excellent. In addition, I really like the way Kaushal focused on transactions where the customer needs help. It’s absolutely true that whenever someone needs assistance to get their issue solved and they reach out to a company….the company through its people and its actions can either turn that customer into a lifetime brand advocate or make them vulnerable to the next competitor that knocks on their door. It’s always the choice of the company on how they have trained their associates, developed their policies and executed the interaction that will make the difference. Richard Shapiro, The Center For Client Retention