The customer experience is a trending topic right now. Companies are in competition to go above-and-beyond when it comes to delivering outstanding service in order to stand out to consumers, generate positive vibes in the social sphere, and maintain an edge.
From an article we read, based on a book written by Steve Curtin, here are his seven critical touch points that make up a customer relationship, and how your employees can add their own special touch to each.
Express genuine interest. Using customers’ names and listening closely to them is the baseline. Ask more questions about what interests them – from your products to their favorite sports teams. Then remember those interests and refer back to them.
Offer sincere and specific compliments. Telling customers their product or service choice is a good one is the baseline. Compliment their knowledge or insight that led them to the buying choice. Refer to something you remember from a past interaction – because being remembered is a form of flattery.
Share unique knowledge. Explaining how a product, service or process works, will be delivered or will function is the baseline. Captivate customers with bits of inside information – perhaps a special ingredient, peek at a new product, sample of an exclusive service. When you share a “secret,” customers will pass it along and make your business more interesting to others, too.
Show authentic enthusiasm. Smiling and being cordial are the baseline. What’s better is using words that convey enthusiasm: “This is really exciting.” “I can’t want to show this to you.” “I’m excited for you to try this.” “You won’t believe how great this is.”
Use appropriate humor. Being friendly and building rapport are the baseline. Employees can choose to use appropriate humor at the appropriate time. One type that can work is self-effacing humor. Topics that are off-limits always include politics, sex, religion and race. Period.
Provide pleasant surprises. Thanking customers and an occasional coupon are the baseline. Planning in advance to give customers unexpected extras is a better approach. Any pleasant surprise is something that exceeds customers’ expectations. Find something they don’t expect and deliver it for a while. Then stop that, and start something else.
Deliver service heroics. The baseline is solving the issue at hand. An employee who does something that is beyond what customers think is his or her job role is doing something heroic. Handle exceptional situations in exceptional ways. Take on ordinary issues as if they were the most important thing at hand.
Do you know how your company rates in the customer experience / customer service realm? Are you recording your calls with customers and analyzing them for quality assurance, customer service measures, and using that data to continue to evolve and improve your customer experience programs?
If not, you’re not alone, and there is technology available to get you there. Simply recording your calls with customers is one small piece of the puzzle. You have to listen to and analyze those call recordings to extract business insights in order to make improvements to your customer service delivery. Manually listening to and identifying insights is insanely time consuming and impossible even for small businesses, never mind medium to large sized businesses. This is where advancements in technology will be a tremendous help. Speech analytics solutions will automatically scan every call recording in split seconds, searching for just the calls that contain keywords and phrases that you specify as relevant to your business. And, you can create an unlimited number of searches. So, you can scan calls for mentions of specific marketing promotions, customer service upsell programs, and even for specific phrases from a company-mandated script so you can gauge whether or not sales and service reps are actually following that script.
Contact us to learn how you can easily and affordably monitor your employees’ interactions with your customers using our cloud-based call recording and speech analytics technology.
