A customer promise is a simple reassurance that a brand will deliver on every customers’ expectations. It can be as simple as “We promise to deliver your pizza in 20-minutes or you get it free” to “We will provide you with the best after sales service”.
Better yet, if brands go above and beyond their promise and deliver your pizza in 10 minutes, you’ll exceed your customers’ expectations and be on the road to building lasting relationships.
The thing about the customer promise is that brands need to mean it and deliver on it. Because no matter if you’re engaging with a customer via phone, email, social media or an AI Chatbot, if you promise action in two hours and deliver it in three, a customer will be unsatisfied.
Here are three ways you can evolve to make sure that your employees are keeping customer promises, and therefore, keeping customers happy.
Invest in soft skills
In recent years and as a response to the pandemic, customer service has kicked into overdrive to deliver on customer needs and meet a new level of engagement.
As highlighted in the fifth edition of Salesforce’s State of Sales report, companies are responding to increased expectations from customers, and placing greater emphasis on long-term retention of loyal customers over quick wins.
The report reinforces the importance of agents’ soft skills when it comes to delivering exceptional customer experience and turning a new buyer into a long-term customer. Of course, no surprise, that after the challenges of the past few years, empathy, genuine connection with your customers and helping them to solve problems is pivotal to this.
Investment in training is required not only for soft skills but also for working with the latest AI technologies. Quality, ongoing training and the right technology can help service teams be more engaged and productive while also delivering outstanding customer experiences.
Through Customer 360, we’ve been able to provide every employee with the apps and data they need to create stand-out customer experiences. This has resulted in a 32% increase in customer satisfaction and a 30% increase in customer retention.
Combining insights from data with employees who go above and beyond to achieve the best outcome for every customer is what drives our – and our partners’ – success.
Empower your field service workers
Field service workers are becoming pivotal to the front face of brands, so arming them with the same capabilities as their office-based colleagues should be viewed as key to the evolution of modern service.
Findings from our State of Service Report Fifth Edition highlight how delivering excellent onsite service is just as important as service delivering through the contact centre.
Not only does field service have a strategic purpose, but customers also base their perception of a brand on their personal experience of interaction with the company. So a field worker can be a factor in driving new revenue streams and brand differentiation.
Get the Chatbots to help, but have your service agents provide the heart
As the pandemic drove more people online, it also coincided with a rise in customers moving towards digital engagement.
One particularly interesting area has been the impact of AI, automation and chatbots on self-service and the customer service industry more broadly.
Embracing automation and new technologies to reduce inefficiencies and improve communication was a prominent theme that came to light in Salesforce’s Small and Medium Business Efficiency Toolkit. Integrating dispersed information about customers into one small business CRM can create a detailed, easy-to-access profile of each customer’s needs. Not to mention that when sales staff are freed up from administrative tasks, they can spend more time on delivering excellent customer service experiences.
Like any new piece of technology, the true success of any AI implementation will be determined by your interaction with the customer. Showing empathy throughout the customer experience is critical. This means not only rectifying a problem or answering a query, but also ensuring that the customer leaves with a positive sentiment for the brand.
Customer service is all about making the customer feel good about the product, brand or company. While the automation of repetitive non-interactive tasks has very little downside, when it comes to personal interaction and relationship building, the less personally we deal with customers, the weaker the relationship becomes. That’s when disloyalty becomes easier for the customer to justify. We need to use technology, but in the right way: to deliver on our promises to our customers.
If you’re after more insights on customer service, download the latest State of Service report today.
Fourth Edition State of Service
Insights from over 7,000 customer service professionals worldwide.
