Are your CRM and customer service team meeting their expectations for your small business?
Most often than not the answer to this above-stated question is revealed only when businesses are in a negative place and your customers are not happy with your services and/or offerings.
Globally, 54% of all consumers say that they have higher customer service expectations than they did just one year ago. - Microsoft(2021) Click To TweetThis is because it is only when your customers are unhappy, we audit our customer’s satisfaction with their service experiences and try to douse the fire before things go out of our hands.
Now while held up in traffic on a busy morning, you might find yourself jammed and stuck behind a public vehicle with a bumper sticker that reads- “Hello! How is my driving?”
Well, even though it is one way of showing that cars with bumper stickers stuck on them like these shows that they are ready to continuously evaluate their own performances, nevertheless asking “How are we doing” is a good step in showing that your business does care about how potential customers think about your brand and your company.
This is because it takes more than just asking the public to figure out if the customer service that your company is providing is meeting the real expectations of your customers.
Companies (especially small businesses) have pretty comprehensible indications when their customer service is bad.
Therefore, it is only when it becomes just about impossible to keep up with a volley of negative remarks and criticisms on social media and when sales start to dwindle or they are increasingly having to offer ‘make good’ that managers and leaders are quick to see how they can improve the way questions and complains are handled by the service teams in the organization.
However, by the time they reach that aforesaid point, it might already be too late to keep up with a valuable relationship or prevent permanent damage happening to the brand.
Hence, most successful small businesses have learned to stop and make changes wherever it is necessary based on the variety and volume of customer complaints coming through.
In fact, successful businesses armed with CRM and customer service team take a hard look in the rear-viewing mirror before continuing on their customer support journey, to ensure that they have not missed any important markers on their way.
Therefore for ascertaining if the service provided to your customers is good enough can involve a mixture of subjective indicators and formal methods, out of which below are five to consider for your business growth:
1. Find Out What Is Good Enough
There are several anecdotal indicators of customer service metrics to choose from, and there are also a lot more of it than what is common across your industry.
Irrespective of whether you are using Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM software these data can be readily captured as they directly impact your business growth.
Some of the most popular metrics found in easy to use CRM software include CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) score, NPS (Net Promoter Score), and CES (Customer Effort Score).
Although it is really hard to reach 100% in any of them, nevertheless based on Revenue per Customer, and Customer Retention and Churn rate, determine what looks good and what appears to be great for your startup or small business.
2. Use Multiple Effective Feedback Loops
Most businesses big or small do some kind of survey to measure the quality of their customer service at one point in time or another.
This can work if your business has some sort of solid email database in the business CRM, or you know of a convenient point in the customer journey where purchasers are most willing to complete your survey questionnaire.
In other cases, several small businesses and startup organizations even offer simple online forms on their websites to collect feedback on their support services, or in modern times a ‘hashtag’ that can be used on social media for viewing their feedbacks.
Always remember that presently we dwell in an omnichannel world and so according to certain research conducted it states that more than 40 percent of customers prefer not to do business with brands if they are incapable of using their preferred channel(s) for conveying their issues and feedback.
3. Remain Aware Of Organic Feedback
Even if you have set up channels to get the opinions of your customers and find the right metrics for measuring your customer satisfaction scores, there will always be certain customers of your brand who share their experiences (good as well as bad) on their own accord.
This can be a comment made by the customer to a sales rep (once they approached for selling a new product), something said in a public forum, or on stage at an industry-specific event.
Therefore remember to check and pay special attention to these customers who take time to send snail mails even in this era of digitalization and social media as to whether they have been pleased or displeased about the customer service they received from your brand.
4. Test The Effectiveness Of Self-Service Tools
Finally, your small business might create a solid product/service manual, or create a knowledge base and an open library of necessary documentation and other content online to aid your customers help themselves.
However, if most of these generated contents go unused, it becomes pretty obvious how good these resources have been marketed or developed for helping your customer’s needs.
Self-service is just another customer service channel. Irrespective of whether it is a sophisticated Chatbot, or simply a community of online users where your customers can come up with answers aided by their peers, the use of self-service in customer support once you use CRM and customer service team to create the knowledge base shows how well they trust your brand to empower them with DIY (Do It Yourself) capabilities.
