[Webinar Recap] Customer Service Master – The Secret To Our 5-star Ratings

Why Customer Service is important to the success of any business?

So what is Customer Service? CS is defined as the “act” of supporting and advocating for customers. 

When building a successful business, everything screams for attention. Within that flood, why prioritize customer service? In short, happy customers lead to more money, growth, and sustainability.

If you haven’t believed in the power of good customer service, here are 6 reasons why CS is the key to the success of any business.

• Your revenue can increase if you provide good customer service. It is very important if you are looking to pump up your revenue as 84% of organizations report an increase in revenue when improving customer service according to Groove (one of the most popular customer service software). Microsoft has also pointed out that 90% of Americans use customer service as a factor to decide whether or not they want to go for the service. So it is no secret that there would be no business and profits if there were no customers.
• Happy customers build a better reputation for your brand for free. After a positive customer experience, 69% would recommend the company to others. We all know how effective word-of-mouth marketing is.
• Customer retention correlates to customer satisfaction. 75% of people would return to a company with excellent service. Once again, 0 is spent on retention.
• Your brand awareness also soars with positive customer experiences. 55% of customers become a customer of a company because of their reputation for great customer service.
• Churn decreases with more customer care. 89% of customers begin doing business with competitors after they experience poor customer care.
• Marketing spend lessens with more customer advocates. The marketing budget lessens with more customer advocates as 56% of people would recommend a company with excellent customer service to family and friends.

From these significant numbers, customer service does play an important role in increasing your revenue.

So the question here is, how to make your customers happy all the time?

Outstanding Customer Service tips to never forget

TIP #1 Speak as your customers do

You should communicate in the same language with your customers, but what does it exactly mean to “speak as your customers do”?

Keep in mind that your customers want to have a conversation with you, so you should not treat your customers as some kind of object. You don’t want to say something like “thank you for your order #12345, we will update you via support ticket #6789”. It makes your customers feel like they are exchanging letters with you instead of having a normal, casual conversation. Say something like

Thank you for choosing us. This is to let you know that we have received your order and we will get back to you as soon as possible regarding the status of your order

Be friendly, personable, and casual. There is no need to be overly formal.

Moreover, using an international language like English is enough. Here at LitExtension, we have customers from all over the world and we use 100% English to communicate with them. But if you still want to talk to your customers in their native language, you know to have more understanding, there is a bunch of translating software out there that you can rely on such as Global link, Pairaphrase, Text united, Phrase, and Geoworkz.

You could actually make it clear that you do not speak the language, but you want to understand the customers better right off the bat to show that you care for them.

TIP #2 Use positive language

The second tip is always using positive language, which we believe you are very familiar with.

Why positive language? It is a great way for you to avoid any accidental conflicts from miscommunication. You can always ask your customers again to clarify their requirements without showing that you are being negligent when using positive language. Besides, nobody likes to be surrounded by negativity, so always be positive and refrain from using negative language.

TIP #3 Know how to close a conversation

Another crucial tip is that you and your CS team should know how to close a conversation. Surely, you don’t want to leave your customers feeling the experience was not complete. When you feel like everything is done and it is time to close the conversation, please make sure that you show the customers three important points that you care about getting it right, you are willing to keep going if the customers are saying it is still not right, and the customers determine what is “right”.  It may sound a bit harsh, but a simple ending sentence like

Please let me know if that works for you”

or something like that would do it, but feel free to take it to another level as a complete experience would make the customers happy to leave you a glowing review.

TIP #4 Great customer service should always be available even if you aren’t

What do you do if your customers ask for your help specifically when you are currently out of your shift or you are not available at the moment for some reason?

The first thing you should do is try explaining your situation to the customers if they are not in an emergency and they have been pretty easygoing.

I am not available right now, gotta take care of some personal stuff, but I will get the issues resolved first thing tomorrow or when I get back to the office.

If it is really urgent and would need attention immediately, the best thing to do is to ask for your colleague’s help or even your manager. It is doubted that they would say no.

4 Actionable tips to get 5-star ratings on multiple platforms

First of all, have the team address basic, common questions with scalable templates. There will be questions that you encounter multiple times. Therefore, a template to handle these questions would save a lot of time and still maintain the quality of service. Of course, when you create the templates, you have to set guidelines for identifying common questions and when or how a saved reply is written or said.

Keep in mind that “customers always get value” and it means that customers should always get what they expected even when their expectations weren’t right. Because if they don’t, what are the other alternatives that we could offer them?

You could educate them, bring their expectations in line with what you could do to meet their needs. Consider saying 

I understand why you expect that and as much as I’d love to help you, I wish that we could and I apologize for that, but please let me explain why we can’t so we could clear the air here.

Another thing you could do is to pleasantly surprise them. Try to find something that they wouldn’t expect and surprise them. If customers get what they want, that is just value, but if they get what they didn’t even expect. That is a surprise and it would elevate their customer experience for sure.

Another actionable tip for you is that do not be shy when asking for a 5-star review if the customers are absolutely happy with the service provided. You could always add something like

your review is not only important to us but for others, making them feel assured and confident in choosing us”

at the end. Ask for a review video as well if the customer does not mind going on screen. Let them know that it will be posted on your website or some sort of social media because it allows customers to have a voice that can impact others. Reviews generate reviews as just a few reviews would be enough to give others incentive and confidence to leave their own opinion about the service. So do not hesitate to ask for reviews when you are doing a good job supporting your customers.

Try to be open about the above suggestions since customers must trust and rely on you as an expert to strengthen the relationship. And of course, one of the best ways to build strong relationships with customers is to develop your reputation to be a professional who delivers exceptional results. Make sure that you do not make unrealistic promises and oversell yourself. Set proper, reasonable expectations with the customers and always try to exceed their expectations.

At LitExtension, we have a policy that we only provide the technical support for every migration for up to three months and to extend it you would have to make an order for it, meaning you have to pay for it. It has been clearly written on our website and we also make it very clear about that before any All In One migration. However, sometimes we still extend the support for free without any additional cost. 

The four actionable tips are:

• Provide exceptional customer service and maintain high standards
• Make sure customers know their 5* rating benefits others
• Don’t be shy to ask for 5* if the customers are very happy with your service
• Work on building relationships with your new and existing customers

How to maintain a strong Customer Service team

This is something that we do from the hiring phase for interns and to probating staff. We are not afraid of investing in great people as the quality of your service will never exceed the quality of the people providing it. We also function based on this principle: “hire who you trust and trust who you hire”. Of course, there should be standards to determine whether one is worth investing that you and the board agree on.

Besides investing in great people, you should also work on the whole company/team approach. Get the whole team involved in a real ongoing customer service situation and that way, the team members will get familiar with issues, bugs, and features much quicker. Every LitExtension member should feel the customer’s pain, frustration, anger, and emotions so they will be more empathetic towards the customers. To have the whole team approach, you should unify the team first. Use a support lexicon, outline the processes, building the templates, etc.

At LitExtension, not only do we maintain the level of customer service that we provide, but we always look for ways to push the team to move forward as well. We schedule customer service training twice a week where we watch videos from customer service professionals and discuss them. We practice handling various situations where we have encountered in the past in many different ways to come up with the best solution and apply going forward.

If your budget allows, we would recommend having a customer service training professional come in and train your team in person. That way, you could make sure that your team is moving in the right direction instead of wandering around and staying at the same place. 

How to handle customers’ complaints

The first thing is to listen with empathy. This should be hard for you to hear bad complaints. You might get irritated, triggered, maybe even angry and you may ask: how am I supposed to listen with empathy?

Let’s imagine that you are in the customer’s situation and the service that you are using let you down like … badly, would you be so calm as to discuss options with the customer service representative? Probably not, so there you have it: Empathy.

Then, you let the customer vent, try not to interrupt them because that just makes them even more furious. Have them say it all out then they will be in a better mood to hear your proposition. Be supportive, you know something like

I understand your frustration, I would be just as frustrated if I were you and I want to be supportive and help you get these issues resolved.

Most importantly, do not blame someone else if you and the customer know for sure that the service provided did not meet their expectations. Let us just agree that no one wants to do business with liars and irresponsible people, so don’t blame others if you are at fault.

So what do you do after admitting your shortcomings? You offer solutions and you follow through to make the customer as happy as possible.

Q&As

# How do you handle an abusive customer?

To handle an abusive customer, first, you will have to identify the reasons why they are abusive because it will give you insight into the possible state of mind of your customers. You could use that to relate to them on some level. There are a few reasons:

• Career: maybe they are having a hard time at work, their boss is cornering them and they could lose their job if the use of your service does not go well
• Finances: They might be experiencing extreme financial difficulties, lack of money something like they just lost their home to the bank or they just had to spend a huge chunk of money on other services that did not go well for them
• Overall well-being: There are just some people who have been abusive customers for a very long time, so it became the norm for them.

That would give you the answer to: Why are the customers upset?

Find out what they want at the end of the transaction. Ask questions, make sure they understand that we want to keep them happy. Something like

What can we do to make you leave happy?

The next step is to reassure them that you are committed to serving them, looking for positive solutions to their problems. Use empathy to show that you truly care about getting it right. Then change the customers’ focus on something positive and that would help them feel positive.

The easiest way to do this is to ask them questions with positive answers or at least neutral. And of course, resolve the customer’s problems.

# You may feel irritated towards a customer before because their requests are too much and they are getting angry. How do you keep being positive in that situation?

Instead of focusing on your irritation, try to offer the customer explanations or options. You know when it feels like you are running out of ways to fulfill the request because it is probably out of your services’ scope. You can try saying something like

One thing we can try is something something

instead of  “There is nothing we can do for you because it is out of the scope that we support”. Even there seems to be no guarantee that the option will work, but customers tend to calm down when they feel the effort coming from you. So, you need to distract yourself from your emotions and keep the conversation positive by offering explanations and options.

# Suppose you got a valid complaint from a customer, what do you do?

First off, say sorry. You know it is okay to say sorry and you should mean it. Then let the customer know how you are going to handle the situation. But whatever it is, you should let the customer know that you are going to take care of it, the problem will be solved & won’t happen again to maintain their trust in your service. Then follow up, communicate how you would do that. Maybe something like

I will contact you to check if there are any changes made tomorrow or in the next 12 hours.

Finally, do the work and rectify the situation. Minimize the chances that it will happen again as best as you could.

# What do you think would be an appropriate answer to something that the customer is asking that you just cannot give?

There are other alternatives that you could do in case the customers look like they are not getting value because their expectations aren’t right according to the policy. Therefore, what you should do is to explain why it is not working and why you cannot give them what they want and make sure that you really show them that you do wish you could give them what they want. Acknowledge their emotions and you could suggest a value-added solution that they didn’t expect to pleasantly surprise them. Ask if they would like to speak to the manager, so you could have him back you up, but that is optional.

You could say things like

I’d love to extend the migration for you, but it is clearly posted on our website that … , we also mentioned this before getting migration started. What would you like if we level up your partnership with us, so that next time you purchase our services, you will get better prices

Or something like that and it doesn’t always have to be about “getting better prices”.

Final Words

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us or join our Facebook Community for further information! Here’s a recording of the webinar Livestream! Don’t forget to visit LitExtension Youtube channel for other webinars and more interesting eCommerce-related videos!