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Today’s tech savvy, connected customers have high expectations and want instant gratification. And with social media, their delight or despair at how you respond to a query is broadcast to the world with a click. So, what should you and your organization be doing today, to offer a great online customer experience?
1. Get the Data
First up, get to know your customers. No, you don’t have to take them all out for coffee, but you do need to collect information on them to offer a consistent, personalized service. There's a wealth of customer relationship management (CRM) systems out there. They let you store information such as buying history and previous interactions.
Once you have this information, make sure anyone who’s likely to have contact with your customers has access to it. For example, if a customer calls IT support with a recurring computer problem, it saves time and hassle if you already know what model they have, what happened previously and what was done about it. If they then get in contact via Facebook with a follow-up question, having the same level of service from someone who knows what has happened before is going to make them happy.
2. Remove Pain Points
As a minimum, your website should display up-to-date content and be open to as many people as possible. Particularly those with disabilities, and be easily navigable on all devices and browsers. No one wants buffer purgatory or having to log on to a site multiple times.
Beyond these basics, you can use data to make customers’ lives easier. Online shopping for groceries can be made much quicker by storing the things people regularly buy and allowing them to browse those items easily, for example. Companies like pharmacists Boots also offer complementary items before the basket to go with orders, easily and on-screen. And clothes retailers ASOS sends you an order confirmation email with a link to track your delivery. Your customers may be willing to pay upfront for a product or service they haven’t yet seen. But they will also want to know what happens if the goods don’t meet their needs or expectations.
It’s important, so make it as easy as possible for them to return and exchange or get a refund for the goods. Your returns policy should be in a prominent position on your organization’s website.Importantly, make it easy for them to find help. You could also consider using ‘chatbots’ which sit in the corner of the screen and make it easy for people to get answers to their questions. Either from an AI that can provide basic answers to FAQs, or from a real person. If that option is beyond your website’s capacity, at least make sure there’s an easy, well-signposted way for your customer to get in touch or leave their details so you can get back to them. If you don’t, they might well just leave.
3. Pay attention
You need to know if someone’s talking about your organization online. Not just so you can deal with any complaints, but so you can respond quickly to opportunities.
Customer feedback is an invaluable tool to help you improve your product or service and make it more appealing to your target market. So, it’s important to provide the means for them to leave comments or post a review.As well as checking your email inbox, programs can automatically reply to emails, ensuring a real human will be in touch soon.
Follow-up emails can ask for feedback on how well you answered a query.There are also plenty of programs out there that will monitor social media for you and let you know when your company is mentioned. But you still have to make sure someone is monitoring it. Preferably, it should be someone who has access to the information and authority to solve problems. Or take advantage of a chance to provide exceptional service. Just like Dougie from Edinburgh Trams, who tracked down a passenger’s lost suitcase for him before the lost property office even opened.
4. Be prepared to be spontaneous
Sometimes you’ll get a chance, out of the blue, to do something brilliant that will delight a customer and make them a permanent ambassador for your brand. Not only that, but because things like this happen in the word of social media, it’s not just good customer service, it’s marketing too.
When Morton’s Steakhouse showed up to the airport with a steak for a hungry writer, with only a few hours’ notice, they did it because they were monitoring social media. They had a great CRM system that let them know he was a regular, loyal customer, and they had a system in place to quickly get authorisation for it. In other words, everything came together to deliver an amazing bit of customer service that went viral and did their brand all kinds of good. But this doesn’t happen on a whim; it needs the infrastructure to spot the opportunity and act on it.
5. Be real and be funny
Unless it’s completely inappropriate for your brand, don’t be afraid to be human, and to use humor in the right place, when dealing with a customer. Many of the customer service stories that have become legends revolve around someone at a company responding with a sense of humor.
Whether it’s Argos replying to a customer enquiry about a PS4 in his own street slang, Greggs turning Google’s algorithm failure regarding the bakers’ logo into classic banter with the search giant, or SmartCar taking a crude bird-related joke at their expense and turning it into an educational infographic, humor is king on Twitter. But be careful: as Hawke and Co found out when dissing a Tweeter’s small number of followers, taking the ‘sick burn’ route can backfire if you get it wrong (and the producer of The Big Bang Theory retweets you). [1]
Bring all of this advice together with empowered employees, and you’ll be able to provide slick, personal and, most of all, genuine customer service online. Then watch your brand identity grow.
References[1] You can Google all of these for the full stories, but beware of some ‘language’. Twitter is not for the faint-hearted!
