Make Your Customers Your Priority

It is great if you have a social media strategy in place for customer service, you may even be in the 30% of brands that now have a dedicated customer service accounts on Twitter, but it is important to remember that advocacy does not start or stop on your social channels. You need to provide a positive and cohesive experience at every touchpoint. Are you providing better service to your customers that contact you via social? Are you ignoring your customers that contact you via email? Are you providing an amazing experience to those calling you so that they do not need to look for alternative methods to reach you?

Unfortunately, over the last few months I have seen it all. I have been put on hold for over an hour, just to get fed up and turn to Twitter for support and receive a response within 2 minutes that caters to my needs. I have had amazing service on the phone just to be forwarded on to a third party pushy sales affiliate. I have emailed a simple question and not received a response. I felt like none of these companies understood my needs or left me with a positive experience.

For a company, this could adversely affect their overall business. Customers are far more likely to share their negative customer service experiences than their positive ones, but even the positive experiences often get shared with friends, family, and to their social networks.

People trust people far more than they trust the companies themselves. Why not give them a positive experience every step of the way? That includes customer service, so that when your name comes up in a conversation you can rest assured knowing that it is most likely done in a positive manner.

This does not happen overnight, and doesnt happen by accident.

Here are some tips to get started:

• Identify common customer service situations and pain points. This will help you categorize your customer needs and start identifying how your customer service reps should respond to various circumstances.

• Develop a standard response plan that your customer service team can use as a playbook for common situations. This will ensure that each customer is attended to in similar ways, regardless of the channel the customer is using.

• Create a governance and escalation model. This will define roles and responsibilities and determine when situations need to be attended to by varying members of the organization. This will eliminate fire drills and give your employees the resources needed to handle the issue at hand.

Stop the madness. Make your customers your priority and start delivering those positive experiences. It will not only affect your brand sentiment, it can also affect your bottom line.

I want to hear your personal experiences, or what your company is doing to ensure that your customers needs are met. Leave a comment below

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