Stories of great customer experiences often go viral because they’re exceptional outliers. An airline saves the day by flying out a bridesmaid dress, or a support rep saves a life by realizing the caller was having a stroke. “We tend to think of customer experience as these big old moonshots, and going above and beyond, and just knocking socks off,” says Samantha Chandler, one of Zendesk’s customer success team managers.
Don’t bother choosing between speed and quality when it comes to customer experience, because businesses need both to be among the best. Speed plus effectiveness is the formula for CX success, according to findings by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Research. Leading CX orgs are customer-centric to the hilt; they resolve customer issues more quickly, all while handling more customer requests overall and engaging with those customers on more channels.
For IT leaders, customer experience was already a hot topic, but the pandemic has amplified the importance of delivering a thoughtful and modern customer experience. Today's challenges bring into focus those attributes and hurdles that most directly tie to customer experience. In a nutshell, positive customer experience ties directly to revenue.
A lot of companies react to growth pressures by trimming their customer support budget. That may provide some quick breathing room, but it’s not a prudent long-term solution. After all, it’s cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. And when we polled consumers on what factors inspire the most brand loyalty, 57% cited good customer service, making it second only to price. Luckily, there are ways to invest in better customer service without ballooning the budget.
At Zendesk, my team and I are going beyond adjusting for the new normal. We are taking this difficult time as an opportunity to completely reimagine how we work. Covid-19 forced us on a journey to reenvision and realign our practices, tools, and services.
Keeping up with customer expectations is vital to your business — and that means your support operations need to be nimble. Does your support software allow your team to easily add new channels? Or enable your agents to easily switch between channels keeping customer context? If not, it might be time to consider a switch. Here are four ways Zendesk can help you deliver great customer service (and make your life easier).
Across industries, people tend to fall into the habit of using acronyms to describe common concepts they encounter. Customer service representatives are no exception. But anyone new to the industry or trying to understand it from the outside, acronyms make communication confusing and difficult. And even people who have worked in customer service for years may still come across the occasional acronym that leaves them scratching their heads.
The customer service industry is continually evolving. It seems like every day there’s a new social media platform your agents need to adopt to stay relevant to your customers. The good news is, one thing hasn’t changed: People still prefer a phone call over any other customer support channel. (Yes, even millennials.) If you want to win over your customers for life, you need to offer exceptional over-the-phone customer support.
The customer service requests your agents field have something valuable to tell you about your customers, product, and business. More than that, the cumulative data produced by your customer service tickets can reveal key insights. But for your business to learn from the information included within all those requests, you need a good method for tracking and analyzing them.
We’ve all heard the stories of companies going above and beyond to provide their customers with incredible support: Some of these stories are heart-warming. Some are inspiring. And some garnered good PR and attention on social media. One thing they all have in common, though: None of them is scalable. No restaurant could afford to deliver an airport steak to its entire customer base. And while giraffe bread hit the mark, it wouldn't be advisable for companies to take every branding suggestion.
