How To Deliver The Best Customer Service Experience

For the discerning customer, economics is not the only criteria when it comes to choosing a product or service. How customers feel when they experience a brand is just as important as the quality of the product or service they are paying for. AI-powered sentiment analysis and text analytics platforms are helpful tools that can help brands know their audiences’ emotions better and thus help them build data-backed strategies to deliver a really great customer service experience.

This article tells you how you can use technology to create a memorable customer service experience that can transform your business into being more proactive and responsive.

What Is Customer Service Experience?

A customer’s feelings of exhilaration, satisfaction, exasperation, or boredom throughout their purchase journey at your brand, as they reach out for support and services, is what is called customer service experience. Whether it is at a physical store where people can look and feel things before buying, or whether it’s an online shopping experience, consumers expect their sales and aftersales journey to be smooth and stress free. That’s why listening and devising plans based on your voice of the customer analysis is crucial.

Ensuring that your website loads fast, it has no glitches, customer support emails are timely, all credit card or other payment transactions are secure, timely response to social media mentions, all lead to a great customer experience. Similarly ensuring there are customer support staff available to answer customer queries at a store, quick and easy processing of refunds and returns, as well as convenient parking facilities, are some of the many things that can enhance customer satisfaction in their experience of your brand.

Why Is Customer Service Experience Important?

Customer service experience is a crucial part of a business’ growth and success life cycle. A great consumer experience can lead to long term relationships with customers and build strong brand loyalty that can withstand the test of time. Sentiment analysis tools can harness information from social media listening as well as surveys and other VOC data, and thus assist brands in coming up with intelligent and innovative ways to improve customer service. Below are some of the key reasons why brands must pay close attention to customer experience.

• Stronger customer relationships

A thoughtful and efficient customer service experience fosters stronger trust within customers and betters a brand’s relationship with them. When customers perceive a brand as authentic it builds a sense of belonging in them. They relate better to the brand because it makes them feel that they are important and their opinions and presence matters. Companies like Marks & Spencers, Hudson’s Bay, Krogers have been time tested through tumultuous periods and yet have never lost customers due to their strong relationships and brand persona.

What is customer service experience to others has been just a way of life for businesses like these that have existed long before social media platforms or even the Internet existed. They knew back then, what we know now - that word of mouth advertising is way more effective than any other medium of advertising.

• Brand loyalty

Building brand loyalty is a long term strategy but one that rests on customer service experience as much as on products and services a company offers. The better the brand experience, the easier it is to build brand loyalty. Many companies offer brand loyalty programs for this reason. There have been cases where brands have been immune to competition just because of the level of brand loyalty from customers. It is to a large extent because of superior product quality but also to a very certain degree because of the customer service brands provide.

• Better products and services

Knowing your customers and providing them with an engaging customer service experience helps you develop better products and services because your customers tell you what is working and what is not. Text analysis of surveys and questionnaires can easily let you know your net promoter score as well as give you audience insights about many aspects of your offerings. Videos of product reviews put up on social media sites like TikTok, YouTube, or Facebook can be gleaned through video content analysis for meaningful information about how you can improve your offerings as well as where you stand compared to competitors.

• Insights into consumer behavior

Sentiment analysis of customer comments, product review videos, survey answers, blogs, emails, and even customer care call logs can give very intricate information. They can tell you about who your customers are, how each demographic behaves, and what their motivations are. Companies can use this information to improve their marketing strategies and develop more targeted content for each specific group of customers. Audiences can be asked what is customer service experience to them, what they would like to see improved, what their preferences are, and then this data can be used to develop related strategies. This can be applied to loyalty programs, after sales services, season discount programs, returns and refunds, and many other areas of business operations.

• Brand differentiator

When products from two or more providers are the same in quality, customer service experience becomes the brand differentiator. Many brands even advertise themselves focussing solely on after sales services for a hasslefree consumer experience. This is because they know, when it comes to products like home appliances, digital devices, travelling gear, home furnishings, vehicles, and such, customers almost always dread reaching out to customer service in case of a product breakdown or repair. Many companies know this and therefore pay close attention to users of their products and not just buyers.

Know more about how companies use customer experience insights.

Build Your Customer Experience Strategy For 2022

A good way to prepare for 2022 is to reimagine your customer experience strategy. Even if you think you are great at what you do, there is always room for improvement. To develop a stellar strategy for the coming year you must:

1. Define your objectives so you know which areas you want to focus on- whether they are online, physical, social media driven, or more program oriented.

2. Develop buyer personas so that you can segregate your customers based on demographics and buyer behaviour. This will allow you to create targeted marketing campaigns and better utilize your investment for improved customer service experience.

3. Nurture your customer support staff and provide them with efficient training skills and product updates so that there are no discrepancies in their information and what customers are told. Your staff can also have many insights as to what is customer service experience to them and what they notice in their daily interactions with customers.

4. Use technology to improve your productivity and know your customers better. Chatbots, sentiment analysis platforms, text analytics tools, video log data through video content analysis, all can help you in this endeavour.

5. Measure your key performance indicators consistently so that you know whether your new strategy is performing well or not. Don’t be satisfied with dry metrics such as number of shares, likes, or comments on your social media posts. Dig deeper and analyze comments and videos for sentiment to know the reasons behind the success of certain posts and to discover emerging trends from comment analysis.

6. Adjust your strategy based on your metrics and know that even if you think a campaign is not a success, it is a learning. And a learning is never time or effort wasted.

To learn more about how sentiment analysis and text analytics can help you build a great customer service experience.

Discover more about developing your customer experience strategy.