Customer Service

You may be surprised to know that 96 percent of dissatisfied customers do not complain. However, 91 percent of those unhappy people will never buy from you again. Your top priority is to keep your customers happy. But how can you tell if your customers are satisfied with your products and services? It’s not as straightforward as it may seem, but there are some very useful methods and metrics available. Here is how to measure customer satisfaction that you can start applying to your business right now.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys

The satisfaction survey is the most popular approach to collecting information about a customer’s experience. The basic survey asks each customer how satisfied they are and usually has a few follow-up questions. You can utilize customer satisfaction surveys in three ways:

• Email survey: An email survey is a good way to get an in-depth insight into your customer happiness. Although they have a lower response rate than other methods, they allow your customers to answer multiple questions.
• In-app survey: For this method, you need to integrate a feedback bar on your website. An in-app survey will usually consist of just one or two questions.
• Service survey: This type of survey focuses on customer service or delivery. The survey is taken immediately after the service was provided and can be done by email or live chat.

The standard customer satisfaction metric is to ask your customers to rate their satisfaction with your service, product, or business on a scale of 1-5 or 1-10. The advantages of this metric are its simplicity and its directness. The disadvantage is that customer satisfaction can be hard to rate, even for the customer.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The NPS measures the customers’ probability of referring your company to someone else. This is the most common way to gauge customer loyalty. Each customer is asked how likely he or she is to recommend your business on a scale of 1-10. The NPS is easier to answer than the customer satisfaction survey because it’s about the customer’s intention to refer rather than their emotional satisfaction. This data can easily be gathered using in-app or email surveys.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

This metric analyzes the effort it took to get the customer’s issue resolved. It is typically measured on a scale of 1-7. Market research shows that customers with a high effort score show a reduction in loyalty down the line. You need to aim for as low of a CES as possible.

Pricing Issues

Allowing your customers to express their feelings about pricing will give you useful information, not only about how they feel about the total price of your products or services but also how they feel about their value for the money.

Complaints

It essential that you evaluate complaints thoroughly every time you receive one. You can also broaden your analysis by checking out unsolicited feedback in online reviews and social media. When a customer contacts you with a specific issue, always get back to them and provide a possible solution quickly to restore their happiness.

Social Media Monitoring

The impact that social media has had on the relationship between customers and businesses cannot be overemphasized. This is mainly due to the fact that it enables customer experience to be shared with a much wider circle than ever before. That means it’s the perfect platform for you to find out how your customers feel about your brand. Facebook and Twitter are the obvious platforms but don’t forget the other ones like Yelp, Quora, and TripAdvisor. It’s also worthwhile to sign up for Google Alerts, as this will notify you when your brand is mentioned online. You should also try out Socialmention. It’s a free tool that analyzes mentions of your brand in social media. It will give you information on the likelihood of your brand being discussed online and the ratio of positive to negative mentions.

Motivate your Customers to Participate

Once you have your customer satisfaction metrics in place, you need to make sure as many customers as possible are using them. Asking customers for their opinion will make them feel valued, but some people just don’t want to spend the time. This is where it helps to offer incentives. For example, adding a coupon, reward or additional information will often encourage them to participate in an online survey.

This is a valuable checklist of How to Measure Customer Satisfaction, that can help you get started with measuring your customer satisfaction. If you are struggling to come up with a survey that you think is right for your business, you will find many templates and suggestions online. Get started on satisfying your customers right now!

One of the most important factors of marketing a business successfully is your voicemail greeting, yet all too often, this is overlooked. It’s crucial that you present yourself professionally on the phone. Here are some voicemail greeting tips to help you maximize the value of your voicemail service.

Eliminate Background Noise

Top of the voicemail greeting tips is to make sure you record your voicemail greeting in the right place, where there is no background noise such as noisy children, animals, or honking traffic. If your callers can hear background noise, it will not only impair your professional image, but it will also make your callers feel slighted. It will only take 5-10 minutes to record your message, so do it at home or in your office when you have some quiet time.

Show Your Brand’s Individuality

Your brand is unique, and your voicemail message should reflect that. Avoid using generic greetings like, “I can’t get to my phone right now, please leave a message.” Your voicemail gives you an opportunity to make your business stand out and stick in your callers’ minds. You can incorporate a fact or two about your business or something related to your mission statement. For example, “hi there, you’ve reached Brewster Farms. We provide the finest quality organic mushrooms for restaurants and domestic kitchens. Leave a message so we can help you stock up your larder.”

Keep Your Callers Engaged

Despite the brevity, a business voicemail has a lot in common with a business conversation. Imagine you are creating a dialogue between yourself and a potential customer. That will give you a much more upbeat tone, and your message will be engaging. They will leave the call with a good impression. A good way to encourage engagement is to ask callers to do something. For example, “we’ll get back to you ASAP if you include the name of your favorite movie in your message.” You may not realize it but when you smile, the tone of your voice completely changes. It will make your greeting sound much friendlier.

Write it Down and Practice

Not many people can pull off an unscripted voicemail message. So, unless you’re an experienced public speaker, you’re better off writing it down and rehearsing to avoid those awkward “ums” and “erms.” You’ll also sound clearer and more confident.

Update Your Greeting on a Regular Basis

By updating your greeting frequently, you can keep it fresh. You can easily do this by adding new information such as your latest special offer, or the newest inventory item. You can also mention who to contact while you are unavailable. Just make sure that all your greetings are time-sensitive.

Keep it Concise

Don’t ramble on during your voicemail greeting. Provide just the amount of information that’s needed. If you make your greeting too long, your callers will just hang up without bothering to listen to it, and that means you may be losing another customer. Your greeting certainly shouldn’t be so long that a caller has to call back to listen to it again because they didn’t catch all the information the first time. The optimal time length for your greeting is 20-25 seconds.

Set expectations

Always remember to let your callers know when they should expect you to return their call. And try to keep the wait time to a minimum. For example, let them know you will be available to return their call in two hours, or between 2 and 4 PM. Whatever the window you state in your greeting, remember to stick to your word. Customers will not be impressed if you don’t call them back when you promised to. If you forget to call them back or you are late calling them, it’s unlikely they will deal with your company again.

Check your greeting: Once you’ve completed your outgoing voicemail message, listen to it once or twice to make sure you said what you meant to say and be sure that it matched the professional expectations of your company. If you really want to see how effective it is, dial in from outside as a customer would and make sure the transition to voicemail is seamless.

A Simple Example

Here’s an example of a professional sounding greeting.

“Hello, this is Rebecca at Ambiguous Media. I will be in a meeting this morning, but I will be able to return calls between 1-3 PM Eastern Standard Time. If you need immediate assistance, please press 1, and your call will be transferred to our customer service manager. You can also reach me at rebecca@ambiguousmedia.com. I will be responding throughout the afternoon. Thanks for calling!”

Using these tips will keep you on track when you need to create or update your voicemail greeting. You will always sound professional, and your customers will never feel let down when they call, even when you are unable to answer.

What can you do to gain loyal customers, expand your business, and increase your earning potential? Upgrade your customer service. A skilled customer service team knows how to engage with their customers, problem-solve, and is empathetic to others’ queries.

Customer service is one of the most critical pieces of your business as a whole because your customer service team makes up the face of your company. They are the ones that you are trusting to interact with your customers face-to-face, over the phone, and online. Many loyal customers are created through positive customer service interaction. Therefore, your agents need to be trained in the best ways to serve your clients.

Top businesses know this to be true, and your business can compete with others by following these tips.

1. Humanizing Traits

Your customers want to speak to another human that can listen and answer their questions, but the humans that you hire as your representatives need to embody many skills. Empathy and patience are necessary skills to have when a customer is angry. Your agents must also be able to adapt to every customer, and they should be able to handle your clients’ varying moods, questions, compliments, and complaints.

2. Good Communication

The overarching skill that representatives need is communication skills. This means that your agents can express clearly and intelligently what they want to say. They should stay positive, but not overly so. All customer service agents need to understand what they are selling. If your agents do not understand the product on day one, there should not be a day 2 in their future without further training.

3. Strong Work Ethic

Your agents should be confident in their abilities, embody time management skills, and be able to focus on multiple things at once. A strong customer service agent is also aware of how long they have been on the phone with one customer when they have others waiting. Prioritizing is a top skill you need to look for in your representatives.

4. Handling Criticism

Unfortunately, a big part of the job is dealing with negative customers. Many times, a customer is so frustrated with a product or wait time, that by the time they get to speak to an agent they are fired up and ready to attack. Your agents should have thick skin and be aware that the customer’s anger has nothing to do with them.

5. Record Calls

The best way to train your team is to show them exactly how a call should go, and should not go. Call recording is a useful feature that Global Call Forwarding offers and it can help your business to ensure that the right skills are exhibited on every phone call.

6. Relate to Customers

Your representatives should be able to find common ground with every customer that they come into contact with. A great way to do this is for your agents to engage in active listening, that way they can truly understand where a customer is coming from and sympathize with their situation.

7. Follow-Up

A useful trick in customer service is to follow up after a query has been resolved. It ensures that your customer was indeed helped, and if they weren’t, they can now get the help that they need. Additionally, this can be done to let your customer know that their issue was important to your company and you are happy to see that they are happy and things are resolved. You can do this through a quick email or by reaching out with a feedback survey.

8. Personalize the Experience

If your company deals with several of the same clients, be sure to assign a customer service agent to each one so that they can get used to each other and form a bond. Treat your top customers and clients like they are important to you by sending them gifts or personalized emails. Also, invite your customers to trade shows, host webinars, and always interact with them on social media. Opening up this dialogue is also a way to learn what your customers would like to see from your business.