What is Exceptional Customer Service and How to Offer It?

If you can meet customer expectations, your customer service is quite good. However, if every time a customer reaches out you go beyond the norm and surpass their expectations you are offering exceptional customer services, simply put.

Do you know that for 75% of customers it is important to buy from a company with good customer experience even if it costs more? The number of customers is similar, who think that it is natural to shift to a competitor brand after having one bad experience.

Therefore, it has become crucial for businesses to better their customer support experience to stay competitive. This blog will explain what exceptional customer service is and how you can offer it to your customers.

• Empathetic
• Unexpected
• Generous
• Solution-driven
• Timely

Exceptional customer service is something that the buyers do not expect, but when they receive it, they get delighted. Businesses that use unanticipated strategies to surprise their clients with great customer services have a customer base that can’t stop raving about their favorite brand wherever they spend their time.

This is an essential part of creating a great business. When a customer experiences top-notch customer service, it is difficult forgetting about the business. Therefore if you can create an ‘exceptional customer service’ people will name you whenever your services and products are being discussed.

You understand that delivering extraordinary customer service is no longer something you may or may not have, for customers it is a key differentiator.

To create positive and lasting impacts on your customers and boost serious business growth you need to ask yourself what exceptional customer service means to you and learn how to provide that experience.

If you can imagine instances of extreme personalization, it can seem weird, but it would never fail to grab attention. And that is the power of personalization. If your service gets tailored to your customers’ needs you are up for a good start.

Personalization makes customers feel understood and valued. This feeling makes one satisfied and fosters loyalty for a brand. When a business treats their customers as individuals and remembers their preferences there is a feeling of appreciation. This improves the overall customer experience and builds a more effective and intimate customer relationship.

This is where your CRM system comes into play. Customers can contact your brand through multiple channels such as website, phone, or email, or departments like marketing, or sales, apart from customer service.

Regardless of the channel, your CRM system will save all these conversations over time and give your entire team access to the data. This will allow your customer support members to address customers by their name and understand their issues quickly.

Carefully listening to customer feedback allows you to understand their needs and make your service better. It is a direct statement to the customers who understand that their opinions have value and can lead to new improvements that aim at making their experiences even better.

You should collect and analyze customer feedback regularly through direct interactions or surveys. You should make visible changes depending on the feedback and communicate the change to customers. Nothing is more exceptional than a business that values customer feedback and takes action.

To get started with gathering and working on customer feedback, you should use the best CRM tool suitable for your business to make the collection and analysis process efficient. This CRM system will let you access each customer inquiry (and various other data) and respond to it almost instantaneously. How?

With your CRM software you can use the ready-made email templates to speed up the response and answer most frequent customer queries and stay competitive in the market.

If you think that CRM is just a software solution you have mistaken. It entails a spectrum of activities including customer service improvement, customer data management, lead tracking, and more. And you need a CRM expert to align it to your organization’s unique requirements.

The bigger your customer base gets, the complex CRM gets. That is why to realize its full potential you need someone who has a deep understanding of the platforms and can provide expert guidance. From customization and configuration to CRM migration, whatever your business requires, you need someone to deliver it maintaining the standards you follow.

Many businesses opt for CRM management virtual assistant services, so that they can free-up their on-site employees and allow them to focus on enhancing the customer service. Therefore, letting a VA manage and maintain the customer relationship management systems and prioritizing on the exceptional customer service only is a great idea.

Imagine that you use an app regularly and one day it notifies you that soon this app will go under maintenance and will come back online within two days. What would happen if you did not get the notification and could not use the app properly for ‘no reason’ you know of. It will leave a bad impression in your mind. Instead the app got proactive and saved you the trouble and confusion.

This is a type of customer service that is proactive. Similar to the situation of the app, if you are aware of an issue your customers may have to face, it is an excellent idea to communicate that to your customers beforehand. This proactive approach would enable you to deliver much greater customer service.

It is also a way to show that you care about what they experience and want to support even when you cannot instantaneously solve the issues. This proactive support has the power to transform potential threats to positive interactions and increase trust of your customers on the brand.

It is necessary to identify potential issues before they arise to become proactive. Use analytics tools to monitor customer behavior and reach out promptly to inform or offer any solution even before the customer reaches out to you.

We all know that speed is crucial in customer services because it resolves issues quickly and eliminates the frustration of waiting. This enhances customer loyalty significantly.

You know that your CRM system is there to help, but let’s get a bit deeper.

To streamline the processes and prioritize customer inquiries you need to analyse how long it takes on average to respond to a customer query. If you can divide the queries into levels, for example, level 1 queries (queries that a chatbot can resolve quickly) and level 2 queries that need human intervention and may take time.

Creating these buckets will help you monitor each of them separately and reduce response time significantly. Then you can go on and automate initial responses and acknowledge customer inquiries instantly and inform them about the response time they can expect.

You can also apply a triage system to prioritize customer issues that are urgent by accessing and routing these queries to your most-equipped professionals.

Without the right technology and optimum utilization offering the quickest resolution possible in the market and managing resources would be a mess. Technology is the driving force in many industries, and this field is no exception. Advanced automation lets businesses handle a lot higher volume of client interactions without sacrificing the quality.

By adopting technology and integrating customer service platforms, many businesses have helped the support staff with customer queries. This can make collaboration easy, assist support teams with helpful features, and measure performance, ultimately leading to a greater efficiency.

However, to meet and exceed customer expectations you need a team of dedicated and skilled quality analysts that ensure every interaction meets service-level agreements and a standard you want your brand to meet. Outsourcing your customer service to established customer service providers can be an easy way to ensure this.

The degree of customer satisfaction improves with each tiny improvement in the customer service process. For example, if your support professionals can make right decisions even quicker and resolve issues faster it would greatly improve the customer satisfaction. To do that you need to empower your employees.

This empowerment will boost their morale and encourage them to be more engaged in offering a great service. It can lead to a more flexible and responsive customer service approach which will have a direct positive impact on customers’ experience.

The example of Ritz-Carlton would be appropriate here. They empower the support members with a $2,000 allowance with which they can delight guests any way they see fit without manager approval. They have exceptional customer service not by accident.

You can get inspiration from this and provide your employees with training and resources to make them confident in making decisions on their own. For example, suppose one of your customers has received a faulty product, how can you make up for it? Yes, you will order a replacement, but that is ‘average’. You can add a discount coupon, or a freebie (you can get suggestions from their purchase history or cart) to make the service exceptional.

If your organization is also on the digital transformation journey, it is essential to be agile when responding to changes in business landscape and technology. It is true now more than ever, that it has become crucial to exceed organisational expectations and deliver with a strong digital mindset accompanied by innovation.

Accumulating and organizing customer information and distilling usable insights may not always be something that your business can handle on its own. To do this part of your customer service justice it is a good idea to outsource to a third party customer service provider.

This approach will enable your business to observe, learn, answer, and change like a living organism, which is essential for business excellence as you scale up and continue to move forward. Working with a remote team that equips your business with intuitive decisions making at scale, offer actionable insights and in-depth data visibility, can certainly lead to hyper-productivity and a better customer experience.

If you have read through the ‘empower your employees’ subhead in this blog you know why training your in-house workforce is a must to successfully meet customer expectations. To deliver effective solutions to any customer pain points or queries and craft an exceptional customer experience, customer service agents have to possess thorough technical knowledge about the services or products you offer.

But training your in-house employees is a massive investment of time and money. This approach also has its own set of complications. That’s why many businesses choose to delegate the task to third party customer service providers. They are equipped to provide businesses access to highly skilled and trained agents who specialize in the field. This removes the worry of the effort and costs of training your employees.

While you consider how you can incorporate all this into your customer service strategy, let’s talk about providing support across multiple channels. Offering customer support across various channels makes sure that all your customers can access it. This is to make things for your customers and let them seek help wherever they are.

By offering flexibility in how a customer can communicate, the multi-channel support improves the consumer experience. Offer a seamless experience across multiple platforms by integrating customer service across phone, email, and social media. And you can ensure speed and consistency in your responses by managing the multi-channel interactions in one place.

To deliver extraordinary customer service, every department of your business needs to be customer-centric, not just your customer support team.

Imagine a scenario where there is a cultural difference between your product team and support team. As the latter interact with your customers daily they may have some crucial input on what features you can offer next. But the former, not sharing similar values, may not listen to the inputs and the changes may never be implemented.

A customer-centric culture ensures that the entire organization is aligned with a goal of offering exceptional customer support. This improves service quality, creates long-term customer relationships, and drives loyalty.

As a company leader you have to be the vocal advocates of customer-centricity and embed its values in the fabric of your business.

Do you think people won’t love it? Think again. What is better for a customer, writing emails or making calls to customer support to resolve an issue or doing it by themselves? If they can, that is what they would want to do. Let them solve their problems by providing self-service options.

Customers can solve a problem independently with the help of self-service tools. This saves both your customer and your support team a lot of time, which is good!

Self-service options include troubleshooting guides, tutorials, FAQs, and so on. This knowledge base improves customer satisfaction by letting them solve a problem quickly and easily. However, you should not forget to update the self-service content regularly so that it continues to help.

Suppose you have responded to a query and suggested a solution. Is the work ‘done’ from your end? No. Have you ensured that the suggestion has worked? There’s no way of being sure that your ‘help’ has really helped the customer except you follow up on that. That is the only way to guarantee that your customers feel valued after the interaction.

Exceptional customer service is impossible if you take a set-in-and-forget-it approach to this. It is only possible if you wish to create genuine human connection between your brand and the customer. That is exactly why simply resolving an issue is not the end of your support service.

By following up on customers who have sought help you show genuine care and concern about the customers’ experience. It makes 100% sure that the issue is resolved and the customer is satisfied. Follow-ups can also generate additional feedback which will further guide you to make new improvements to the system or your products or services.

You can automate follow-up emails (don’t forget to personalize them) with meaningful messages that show genuine care about the customer.

Final thoughts

When what you are looking for is exceptional customer service you are up for the road that takes genuine desire to serve the customers to the best of your abilities. However, as you have gone through the pointers it is clear that modern technologies and other services the industry including the global remote workforce has to offer is a big help.

If you have to, go through the pointers again and make notes about what you can implement immediately and what you’ll save for later. This will help you take meaningful action today and start to improve customer satisfaction.