How to Breathe Life Back Into Your Customer Support

73% of customers state that customer experience is the unitary deciding factor before making purchasing decisions. A further 65% also testify that a positive experience with a brand is far more important than influential advertising. More shockingly, 86% of customers are willing to pay more if they get great customer support.

Unfortunately, customer support receives the least attention from businesses that seek to breathe new life into their brands. If you have noticed that your customer satisfaction metrics have begun to fall, you probably need to start with improving your customer support.

Let us take a look at common factors that cause an underwhelming customer experience and what you can do to fix them.

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‍Your customer support is not multi-channel

• 90% of people report having a poor customer support experience on their mobile phones.
• 87% of customers believe brands are not putting in an effort to provide consistent customer experience across channels.
• 67% of customers cite bad customer experience as the primary factor for churn.

If you want to enhance customer experience, you need to show up everywhere your customer does, and pick up from where they left. According to Aberdeen Group, companies which implement omni-channel customer engagement strategies retain 89% of their customers.

According to Accenture, 89% of customers also feel frustrated when they have to repeat their issues to different customer representatives over telephone and digital channels. Gartner research shows that a consistent multi-channel support can help you win back your customers quickly.

Make sure that you provide excellent customer experience on mobile devices. Calling up customer care, writing an email to your support team, and engaging in instant messaging should all be integrated and unified.

If you run a brick and mortar store alongside your online offerings, all customer interactions should be synced with your in-store staff as well.

In short, customers shouldn't have to repeat themselves to different customer representatives at different times. A multi-channel support service makes sure that all members of your support team have access to all customer interactions at all times.

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You ignore after-sales support

• A majority of businesses make the mistake of focusing on customer acquisition and sales, while gleefully ignoring after sales support.
• Acquiring a new customer can be5 to 25 times more expensive than engaging in customer retention.
• 77% of customers recommend brands to their friends after a positive customer experience.

Most customers feel frustrated once they make a purchase due to buyer's remorse. During this crucial and vulnerable period, it is important to provide customer support especially if they want to return a product or if they have technical queries. Make sure to focus on technical and non-technical support, while coordinating with different departments to make returns and cancellations quick and easy.

This is also the time to suggest alternatives, provide status of refunds to reassure the customer, and build a healthy and cordial relationship with those who cancel and return products.

Just because they cancel or ask for refunds does not mean you lost a customer. Instead, offering excellent customer support during a difficult time will underscore your brand's dedication to bring excellent customer service.

In addition, make sure that you offer after-sales support on an ongoing basis. Even if a long period has lapsed between the time of purchase and the time of contact with your support team, make sure to offer the best of customer support.
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‍You don't focus on building relationships

• Most businesses offer customer service grudgingly and this attitude is perceived correctly by customers
• Customers often feel alienated when their feedback and opinions are not taken seriously
• Research shows that customer satisfaction surveys make the customer feel important and valued, while providing you with important insight

Investing in an excellent customer relationship management (CRM) software is not going to be helpful unless you make managing customer relationships a part of your organizational culture.

It is important to probe into the conscious and unconscious desires and anxieties of customers and offer a fix even before they express them. This is possible when you integrate your CRM with multi-channel support and analyze all customer interactions to predict customer pain points.

Collate customer pain points with customer experience feedback and surveys, and implement changes regularly. Most importantly, focus on building personalized relationships with individual customers.

While technology makes it easy to collect information about your customers and derive insights, you need an empathetic multi-channel support team build relationships with customers.

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Break through the branding fatigue

‍Most customers have already begun to experience branding and marketing fatigue. As customer support is neglected by many businesses that are just trying to survive, customers have an additional reason to be cynical about everything that a business does.

This causes customers to seek the comfort of familiar brands and ignore everything else.

By investing in a multi-channel support team and integrating after-sales support into your organizational culture, you will forge valuable relationships with your customers.

In addition, multi-channel servicing and after-sales support ensure positive customer interactions and experiences, all of which lead to improved customer satisfaction metrics.