Customer service can make or break your business. In fact, according to Gladly’s 2018 Customer Service Expectations Survey, out of 1,000 customers polled, 92% say they’d stop doing business with a company after three or fewer poor customer service incidences. And 26% of those customers would stop after just one bad experience.
Link – https://www.gladly.com/latest/2018-customer-service-expectations-report/

This means if you don’t fine-tune your customer service efforts, you could face a gloomy future.

Today, customers expect more of you than ever before. Customers no longer compare you with your competitors. Instead, they compare you with the best customer service they have ever received — from any business or any person. This could be an online seller, a vendor, or a retail store — any business.

Now, customers know what great customer service looks like, and they expect it from you. So, what else do customers expect from you?

More Personalization

Regardless of the many online businesses where interactions can be anonymous, customers want more personalized experiences.

They expect companies to put the information and products they want where they expect to find them. In fact, nearly half of customers will dump their online cart if they can’t find answers to their questions quickly. This means you need to have a support agent readily available to chat and help customers to navigate through your website.

Display prominently the toll-free number on your web pages so that customers can find it easily.

Also, most customers still want a personal one-on-one experience. So how can you offer a more personalized experience in this age of anonymity? Look at customer requests, orders and questions at the end of each day to find the most important ones — those involving a long-time customer, a unique request or a major problem.

Then, assign any issues that need to be resolved to the right employee or department. It’s a special treatment that customers expect and it will make them feel valued and appreciated.

Multiple Channels

The most successful companies today know the value of having multiple channels. And they provide customers with their choice of channel to communicate with them.

It’s more than a choice of channels because customers also expect that their experiences between those channels will be seamless. Consumers want, and expect, continuity when they switch from one channel to another. This means they won’t have to repeat their previous interactions each time they reach out via a different channel.

Yes, consumers have welcomed newer self-service options like chatbots and FAQs, but they hold these options to the same high standards they do human options. And according to the survey by Gladly, over 50% of customers who use FAQs and chatbots are disappointed with their experiences.

Listen Closely and Respond Quickly

This means most of your customers don’t find your surveys and other feedback requests annoying. That is, unless you bombard them frequently.

Customers’ biggest expectations in the feedback requests are that you’ll do something with what they have to say. So, you need to respond to feedback, act on it and let customers know what you’ve done to improve their experience based on their feedback. If not, customers will stop giving you feedback.

Consistent Answers

65% of customers get conflicting answers from different support agents when asking the same question. This is a nightmare, because it causes confusion and a loss of the consumer’s confidence. Also, it’s very common to hear customers say that if they don’t like an answer they get from a support agent, they hang up, call back and ask a different agent the same question.

It’s insane to do the same thing again and again and expect a different outcome. However, this is the reality for many support centers: irrationality and inconsistency are predominant.

Stick by Your Hours of Operation

You don’t have to be available all the time to offer excellent customer service. It’s crucial to run your business on your terms while conveying a sense of consistency and reliability to your customers once you establish a clear scheduling structure.

If you’re open from 8 to 4 every day, stick to it. You don’t want to create confusion about your operating hours. Say, for instance, that you answer calls after close one day, and then another day you don’t pick calls because you’re closed. What happens? Your customers may not know your closing hours and this may encourage more after-hours calls.

And with this confusion, your workday will be stressful and it will reduce your personal time. This is unnecessary because consumers expect businesses to have a defined schedule.

You may be concerned after reading and seeing these statistics. Are customers expecting more? Can you meet all these customer expectations? The answer is yes, you can meet the ever-increasing customer expectations and customers will pay for good service. And good customer service doesn’t cost. It pays.