5 Proofs That Good Customer Service is the Reason Your Business Flourishes

These days, offering a great product or service, even if it’s at the best price, may not be enough to win and retain customers. The modern customer has come to expect excellence in customer service and it seriously impacts their purchasing decisions. For instance, research shows 55% of consumers are willing to pay more for a guaranteed good experience. And companies are on the hook for providing that good experience, given that it’s six to seven times more expensive for companies to win new customers than keeping existing ones. Good customer service pays.”

Request a FREE Conversational Software demo and learn effective customer service.

Woveon, a software customer service startup, realizes the value that your customer service provides and how important it is to keep a flourishing business. Woveon is an easy-to-use online application providing businesses a centralized location to manage their customer channels, such as social media, emails and phone calls. Using machine learning, social listening, a wide breadth of data, and a clean user interface, Woveon helps prioritize inquiries, identify valuable customers, and suggest personalized content. It simplifies online customer relations and makes businesses more efficient in managing the touchpoints they have with customers. We strive to ensure businesses can scale and respond back to all their customer enquiries.

These 5 Aspects of Customer Service Prove the Importance of Good Customer Service

1. Customer Loyalty

stick with me sayings led lights on the wall

Customer loyalty is one of the key features to successful business. When a customer is loyal, they will keep buying products, turning into more and more revenue. But how does a company identify and keep these customers happy? With Woveon, identifying important customers and helping with their every need is easy! Woveon has created AI (Artificial Intelligence) programs that identify businesses-valued customers in multiple ways. Say someone has shopped at an e-commerce website multiple times and has a great buying history but has now run into some trouble. If they contact the store via multiple channels such as social media or email, a representative from the business can pull up their information and understand they are a valued customer. They can focus on their problems more quickly, and this keeps up customer satisfaction.

2. Knowledgeable Staff

happy male and a female bartender

Nothing is more frustrating than calling customer service and feeling more apt than the “resourceful” representative. This is why it is so important to have knowledgeable staff who don’t just stick to a script and set of instructions. Your employees should be able to problem solve on their own. In order to do this, one should hire people who show interest in their business and understand its products. However, having knowledge on more than just the product is important. For smaller businesses, getting to know your customers and being able to talk with them more on a personal level can be very important. With Woveon’s technology, this is a walk in the park. Woveon’s recorded conversations not only help with consistency, but it can also help a customer service rep get to know the client more by reviewing past conversations. Although this may not apply to all businesses, small to mid-sized companies can really benefit from having personable customer service reps who are extremely knowledgeable about their product and clients. So before hiring any applicant, make sure he/she is enthusiastic about the product or service the company provides. 

3. Online Marketing and Social Media

social media online marketing customer service

Most people don’t associate online marketing with customer service, but with so many online interactions going on between customers today marketing teams and customer service work hand in hand. Woveon has the ability to simplify and better market your customer service. With so many different social media platforms, it can be hard for companies; however, integrating all channels onto a single page makes it extremely easy to keep track of all customers conversations.

Try these 5 Creative Ways You Can Use Customer Service to Amp Up Your Online Marketing!

Companies should see social media as a huge opportunity when it comes to advertising and customer service. People contact companies over Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram all the time. Just the other week, I was on a United Airlines flight, and I had tweeted at them. They responded asking me how my flight was going within minutes. This is a great example of how customer service over marketing channels is so important. It shows to their followers how much they are invested in their customers and that they truly care. This also shows that the companies are up to date when it comes to interacting with customers. They are open to change and customers want to see companies that embrace change like they do.a

4. Customer Apologies

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Everyone makes mistakes, some you can control, others just happen. It is always better to apologize first and then move forward. When it comes to customer service, the representative is almost never to blame; however, the customer may think differently. A customer service rep should apologize not only for the inconvenience the customer is going through, but also so the customer can sense that the rep personally cares about the problem.

Click here for 5 email templates to get you out of angry customer situations.

If you are nice to your customers, they, in turn, would be more likely to reciprocate. Of course, there will be good and bad customers, but as long as you are willing to be upfront, apologize for any mistakes you could have made, and are ready to solve the problem, most customer interactions will go smoothly. Remember, solving the problem is only half of the interaction; being fast, knowledgeable, and polite completes the customer service process.

5. Happy Staff = Happy Customershappy staff service

Forbes’ Rodd Wagner writes, “The formula is simple: Happy employees equal happy customers, asserted an article last fall in CEO Magazine. Similarly, an unhappy employee can ruin the brand experience for not just one, but numerous customers.” Happy employees = happy customers works. It’s a fantastic sentiment. It’s the right strategy. It is miles ahead of and far more on course than the assertions of the anti-happiness crowd. And if you need to boil down to a few words the connections between employee experience and customer experience, run with it.”

Staff retention is crucial to your company for improving customer service excellence. Research shows clearly that staff stay when they are happy and respect the company in which they work. Their happiness translates into excellent work when dealing with important customers.

Customer Service

Susane Friedmann, a writer on customer service says, “Customer service is an integral part of our job and should not be seen as an external extension of it. A company’s most vital asset is its customers. Without them, we would not and could not exist in business. When you satisfy your customers, they not only help you grow by continuing to do business with you but they will also recommend you to friends and associates.

The practice of customer service should be as present on the showroom floor as it is in any other sales functions and pertinent in the overall company environment.

Get started with a Customer Service Charter! Set the standards of customer service you expect your employees to deliver and your customers can expect to receive.

5 Online Companies With World Class Customer Management

Giving world class customer service is at the core of keeping your business afloat. After all it is a satisfied customer that forms the building block of your company. Failing to retain your customers will inevitably result in a systematic slow demise of your business, something that any successful business would all like to avoid. Technology has changed the landscape of customer relationship services by bringing about a unique set of tools, also known as customer relationship management (CRM) software, to streamline the cumbersome process of communicating with numerous clienteles.

Learn how to identify valuable customers in one viewRequest a FREE Conversation Software demo today!

By successfully implementing these tools, companies have been able to gain a more thorough understanding of their customer’s needs and if their products are able to match their expectations. Australian companies that are adamant to spearhead their businesses efforts to succeed will have to do more than just understand key internet metrics and viral campaigns. They will have to build a successful CRM strategy. They will need to successfully segment their customer base and schedule bulk emails without spending too much time on them.

What is CRM and Customer Management?

1. By effectively using business analytics to pinpoint a problem with your product which a customer is experiencing, you can easily fine tune them before they spiral out of control and affect all of your customers.

2. A CRM can help you track your customer’s online activities such as the number of times they press the like button on your Facebook posts and their responses to your emails. This will help you gauge their interest, which would allow you to build products that can engage them better.

3. You can also generate an automated response each time your customer submits a complaint. We understand that your customer representative team is not always available to answer any queries, but a CRM can do exactly that! As soon a complaint is submitted to your online forums (or Facebook page), the CRM software will promptly generate a helpful message which will keep the customer engaged to your website and allow more time for the sales team to address their grievances.

4. For most businesses, their emails just stack up on top of each other and are ignored. A CRM ensures that the right emails land in the right category depending on the contact and content. This way your business can ensure that key information about the customer is retained.

Related:
Customer Experience Strategy

Below are 5 Companies that are Killing it with their World Class Customer Management

The following companies have done exactly that and much more – to not only retain older clientele but also increasing the scale of their business to achieve a larger outreach.

1. Dollar Shave Club: Know Your Customer:

crm-know-your-customer-dollar-shave-club


By using an in-house CRM solution, Dollar Shave Club has been able to provide some of the best customer services, which most companies can only look at with envy. Their policy of “We don’t respond to situations, we respond to people,” has helped them grow into having millions of subscribers and satisfied, returning customers. This strategy was so successful that Unilever has acquired them for over $1 billion!

2. YouTube: Suggesting Similar Content to Users

crm-suggest-similar-content-youtube

When you watch a particular genre of video on YouTube, say a gaming video, YouTube quickly picks that up and feeds that into their algorithm. So the next time you log on to their channel, you only see content related to video games. This way you won’t be spammed by boring content that might serve to push you away from their website. Because of this strategy, users who might waste 15 minutes on YouTube searching for their favourite content, can now find all relevant content on the front page.

3. Uber: Sharing Assets

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Customer relationships are at the very heart for companies such as Uber, Airbnb and Lyft. Their entire business is built around satisfying their customers. Uber specifically makes use of Salesforce CRM software to gain insights about their customers and keep track of every single transaction, interaction, ride rating and customer complaint. Uber is a massive corporation with a stupendously large customer base, so how does Uber immaculately address the grievances of their giant clientele? By implementation of a reliable and scalable CRM solution. https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2016/10/how-to-uberize-your-business.html

4. Amazon

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Amazon has hit the nail on the head when it comes to CRM implementation. Amazon makes it a point of strategy to ask their customers to create accounts. This is done so they’re able to collect as much data about their customer as possible. They use this data to segment their customer base, store account information, address details and suggest relevant products for them to buy. Their recommended products are able to keep users browsing through their website for hours on end; which drives up sales.

5. Target in Australia

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Large scale retailers like Target can never even fathom collecting their customer’s data without a proper CRM strategy in place. They can now collect this treasure trove of data from websites and call centres to help accelerate the flow of customer information and keep them abreast of offers that suit their particular shopping habits.

customer service charter template download cta woveon

4 ways of Delighting Your Customer Using Technology

Today’s customer service landscape is changing faster than the blink of an eye and businesses which continue to stay out of the loop – perhaps out of ignorance, arrogance or a combination of them both – are doomed to get phased out of existence by other competitors that manage to keep up with the pace. A study carried out by SalesForce in 2016 showed that 57% of consumers expect the companies, which they purchase their products from, to innovate. This is an obvious consequence of the rapid adoption of technology and as the average Australian becomes increasingly tech savvy, so do their demands. A 2014 PwC study reported that 91% of Australian CEOs believe that technology will significantly change business trends. Here are just some means of winning over your customer with the use of technology

How to Use Technology to Satisfy Customers

1. Provide a mobile platform to users

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Mobile phones are now the preferred means of communication by customers. You could argue that mobile phones have somehow replaced plastic money; the use of credit cards is now seen as a cumbersome process compared to mobile phones! In fact, Australians have spent $755 million in the past five years alone to replace their smartphones, which were broken or lost. Companies which still require their customers to access their services by sitting in front of a computer will more than likely die out in the near future. It will be slow – and painful.

2. Effective use of social media

While no one is asking you to rack up hundreds of thousands of likes on Facebook and followers on Twitter, customers expect you to provide them with a responsive customer representative team, which could help solve out their grievances. As of January 2017, Australia has around 16 million users on Facebook and there are numerous choices and places for these young millennials to get their products from. If your customer representative team shuns them, the customer will ignore you back! Businesses which interact with their customers over social media, quickly climb up the leader board and can easily oust their immediate competition. Another smart idea is to use fancy Twitter hashtags. A perfect example of creative hashtags is by Lorna Jane, a popular retailer for women’s active wear; their marketing campaigns have gone viral because every time they post on Instagram, they make sure to attach a catchy punch line such as #thisisactiveliving.

3. Use of Virtual Reality

While Virtual Reality still has ways to go before the rest of the world could adopt it in large droves, Australia is already seen leading the pack, when it comes to proper implementation of this cutting edge technology. VR is more than just a toy that kids use to play horror games; it has tremendous potential in the tourism industry. If you owned a business providing recreational air based activities, such as hand gliding and paragliding? What are your traditional means of advertising the business? Using high definition pictures and high quality videos? That’s a thing of the past now; customers want to experience your services before actually paying for them. Get it? By using virtual reality footages, you can easily showcase the thrills of all adrenaline filled activities to your customer. They only have to use their VR headsets and compatible smartphones to gain an insightful experience. Competitors that fail to offer a similar service will often see their customers switching elsewhere and might lose out on their business. Tourism Australia uses virtual reality as part of their viral marketing campaigns – and it is working!

4. Using big data to gain some insights into your customer

It is more important than ever today to learn the customer’s behaviour, experience and response to your products and services. The key thing is to collect useful key metrics and discard those your company doesn’t benefit from. You will be able to design your business more creatively around your customer once you know what they like and dislike. An example of a company doing precisely that is Netflix, an entertainment company, which steams episodes of all popular TV shows to your handheld device based purely on demand.Their most popular TV show, House of Cards was designed based on the insight gathered by studying helpful customer data. Big data helped Netflix so much that their executives knew beforehand, that House of Cards would be one big hit. They generated Venn diagrams to pin point how Kevin Spacey was the perfect actor to star in the show. And he was!Similarly, another large company that relies on big data is Uber. Matching you with the driver closest to you relies on complex algorithms which feed on the analytics generated by data. The key to your success probably lies here.

3 Essential Tools To Help Predict Customer Needs

Among the many things that a business needs to keep an eye on, predicting customer needs is one of the most important. Smarter customers have higher expectations and a business that wants to grow has to be able to not only meet these expectations but also predict them. Having predictive customer services might appear tricky but with the help of data analysing tools, you can monitor your customer’s buying patterns, demographics and other behaviours.

Predict Customer Needs. Request a FREE Conversation Technology demo today.

Through enhancing your customer services, you can also offer your clients a better shopping or buying experience as compared to your competitors. In this day and age where even a single bad review can make a difference, providing good quality, predictive customer services can make a major impact particularly in your marketing strategy.

Customer Prediction Tools You Need

Data Gathering

When you’re growing your marketing campaigns, you need to gather proper data on your customers and the following are some of the best resources that let you do so.

Google Analytics

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An old one but a gold one, Google Analytics has helped many businesses monitor the different facets of their customers behaviour. From monitoring the visibility of your website to keeping an eye on how much time the visitors are spending on the site, you can get a lot of data regarding your sites usage. The best part is that you can easily isolate the areas which are underperforming and figure out how to optimise them. Moreover, the data sheds more light on showing you visitor ‘habits’ on the site and how you can incorporate those to offer predictive customer services to them. Another good thing about Google Analytics is that it also allows you to test out any new feature and see how well the changes are being received. UpWork created a great article how to understand the customers coming to your website https://www.upwork.com/hiring/for-clients/google-analytics-to-better-understand-your-visitors/

Kissmetrics

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Another tool that lets you observe the habits of your visitors, Kissmetrics provides invaluable data that can be used to optimise your website and services. Individual monitoring ensures that you find in-depth information that tracks key growth in various segments as well as shows which features are wanted and not-wanted by the average visitor or customer. If you’re tapping into a new target market, Kissmetrics is the perfect tool for you as it allows you to monitor the response and provide more tailored predictive customer services that hit the mark properly. With a multitude of other features as well that are meant to help optimise your business with ease, Kissmetrics makes it easier to analyse and view all the changes being made. Kissmetrics wrote up a great article here about understanding customer data.

Inspectlet

If you find it hard to review the data you have received, you’re going to love using Inspectlet. With the aim of helping everyone, Inspectlet focuses on monitoring customer behaviour to provide credible data regarding site visitation time, areas of interest and more regarding the consumer. Inspectlet also takes monitoring to a whole other level by providing video recordings or playbacks of every visitor to the site. This in turn ensures a deeper level to monitoring. The best part is that Inspectlet is frequently used by sites such as eBay, Cisco and WordPress who are prime examples of great predictive customer services. Have a look at how to apply the Pareto principle to some of your customer analytics.

Applying learnings to use

Once you’ve got all your data in hand, you have to start using it. Anticipation of customer expectations begins here. For this reason, you need to use tools that help you create an engagement plan for future customers. The following are some of the best ones.

Rapid Miner

Rapid Miner offers an open source platform for data scientists to use with ease. With its comprehensive products that are specifically developed according to a particular industry and its requirements, Rapid Miner makes data application into credible models and their deployment easier.The best part is that it’s all open source; the team can collaborate and access the data with ease, regardless of their locality. Big businesses such as Siemens, Cisco, Samsung, Hitachiand more also rely on Rapid Miner for their predictive customer services plans. For an introduction to advanced analytics.

Angoss

Based solely on providing predictive analytics that aid in improving customer services, Angoss has services that are based not only on the industry but also on the nature of the analytics you want. From improving marketing performance to minimising any risks faced, Angoss is the complete solution for any business.Angoss is utilised by PayPal, Walmart, and eBay, TMobile, Cisco, Microsoft and MasterCard. The success of these businesses stands to testament to Angoss’s services. Moreover, with services available on a global level, Angoss is accessible for all, regardless of where they function in.

How to Turn Your Company into a Multi-Channel Success

Multi-channel is the future. Recently, a survey involving a thousand consumers was conducted to study into consumer shopping habits. Of the thousand surveyed consumers, 80% preferred having a choice of shopping in store, by telephone or online. There was a time when all the power in a customer-seller relationship was with local shops. A customer would drive for hours to get a chance to buy something but often, he/she would end up being turned away because the shop had already sold out. Since they got results without making any extra effort, multi-channel marketing or sales did not make sense to the sellers at the time.

Today, the entire relationship has been turned upside down. Now, all the power is with the customer and sellers have to constantly adopt new technology just so that a customer considers them when buying. Today, businesses need to make it as easy as possible for customers to buy something from them. In such times, a good way to increase your chances of netting a sale is appearing on different channels familiar to potential customers. In short, you need to whole-heartedly embrace multi-channel sales and marketing.An opportunity to engage with consumers across a variety of channels, multi-channel marketing allows you to maintain a consistent message and brand. On the other hand, multi-channel selling can help you to profitably sell to more people. With a multi-channel strategy, you can reach the right customers, at the right time, using the right channels and the right messages. This allows you to focus towards marketing efforts, improve customer engagement and achieve better Return On Investment.

See also: Learn how to manage multiple channels with Woveon

To collect customer contact information, companies today use at least three channels. Considering this, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that more and more businesses today are focusing most on their efforts on multiple channel initiatives. Moreover, businesses are doing everything they possible can to make these initiatives successful. So, what are the efforts you need to make your multiple-channel initiatives successful? Following is how to turn your company into a multi-channel success.

Successfully Managing Multiple Channels within Your Business

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Plan Carefully

The most important aspect of your multiple channel strategy is planning. Even if your idea is great, it can turn out to be disastrous if you execute it without much thought. Instead of helping you grow, this will end up costing you. For this reason, you must plan carefully what channels you’ll sell on, what systems you will use and how you will integrate those systems together.

Turn Multiple Channels into A Single View

Using a carefully planned strategy, you can accurately capture and link multiple engagement points into a single identity. When this happens, you will be able to get a single customer view into your multiple-channel activity. With this single customer view, you will know exactly when a customer wants you to reach out to him/her. This in turn will help your business to generate a positive response.

Eliminate the Need for Manual Data Entry

A multi-channel strategy creates repetition of finding customer information, sharing information and customer profiles across different systems and importantly, repeating the same conversation again so the customer service rep can understand the situation. The information stored in these systems includes information related to customers, inventory, items etc. Sharing this information across your systems is mandatory. Whether a customer buys in-store or online, you would want to track his/her order history.

If an item is purchased from your webstore, then the decrease in inventory should reflect in your amazon account and vice versa. Moreover, you must share product information from your point of sale (POS) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) to your online sales channels. Often, businesses using a multiple channel strategy for the first time rely on manual data entry to transfer data from one system to another. Unfortunately, the time and cost incurred in this process is something the business underestimates. It may take hours to manually enter data such as entering online orders into your ERP or POS. Moreover, manual data entry makes you prone to typing mistakes that result in out of stock, lost orders and worst of all, ticked off customers.

For the reasons mentioned-above, you need to eliminate manual data entry when using a multi-channel strategy. Today, there are numerous software-based solutions that automate data processing, speed up processing of orders and eliminate those costly human-errors.

Know Who You’re Selling To

As important as knowing where to pitch, knowing who to pitch to can increase your chances of making a sale. You need to create various ‘buyer personas’ i.e. the customers you’re likely to run into when selling on various channels. These personas represent the different customer groups interested in your product. By customizing your message appropriately to those groups, you can increase chances of making a sale. Ultimately, this will help you to turn your company into a multi-channel success.

5 Customer Analytics You Should Be Measuring

Living in a time where we are so surrounded by technology, we would think that it makes sense that companies would start to take online information and use it to their advantage. Businesses around the world are using customer analytics to drive up profits and keep customers happy.

But what is customer analytics?

Customer analytics is the process by which data from customer behavior are used to make business decisions. In more simple terms, it’s businesses tracking your every move online, compiling profiles on each customer so they can improve the shopping experience. The information they take ranges from four main categories. These include personal, quantitative, qualitative and descriptive data. Now that we have the basics, read on to find out more about the top 5 Customer Analytics You Should Be Measuring to increase your businesses profits and better adapt to customers.

For a better customer conversation management data analytics, use conversational technology. Request a demo now!

See also: Prioritize Customer Conversations

Best Customer Analytics to Boost Business

1. Demographics

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Demographics are the basics of customer analytics. It is essentially a personal profile on each one of your customers. These consist of categories such as age, gender, race, geography and income. This information is important to marketers especially. For example, if a company is trying to target teens and young adults through their marketing campaign, they would be able to see if their advertisements are getting to the correct people. If they see that for some reason only people 40+ are visiting their site, it is easy to conclude that they need to find a new way to reach their intended customers. Demographics, although seemingly basic, are one of the most important customer analytics to track.

2. Sources of Incoming Traffic

traffic source analysis

Being able to track where your customers came from is also an extremely important factor when it comes to customer analytics. If your company has been trying to market on different platforms such as email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat, you can see what campaigns are working. This is essentially the same as the demographics analytic except the difference is in the application they are coming from and not personal qualities.

3. Returning Customer Conversion

repeat customer pie chart

Gaining new customers is 6.5 times more expensive for a company than keeping an existing customer, so why not prioritize your existing customers? This is why using the metric of returning customers can save companies vast amounts of money. If a customer has already been on your site, you can once again track the way they got to the page. Noticing that most of your returning customers are coming from social media, you could possible scale back outside marketing or TV ads. This would most likely cut costs and allow you to focus more on keeping your old customers as well as increasing advertising in places that tend to have returning customers.

4. Page Views

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Page views, one of the more simple topics in analytics, are simply the number of visitors your website or individual page gets. It is important to get the most page views you can to bring in as many customers as you can. This function can also monitor specific blogs or PDFs that your company posts. This will allow your company to post more blogs or PDF that are on similar topics. It is important to know what part of your website interests your users the most so you can develop more of that material.

5. Average Session Duration

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When it comes to making big business decisions, such as spending large sums of money on advertising, a company will want to know who to target and why. All of this information can be found using Google analytics. It is important to know who spends more time on your website so you can gear your advertising toward them. For example, the average Facebook link stays open for only 10 seconds where average direct URL is open for closer to 53 seconds. The people who spend more time are obviously more interested in your product, but you also have to look at where the traffic is coming from to understand the true data. You can even see what pages on your website are visited the most. For example, say that a company has a blog page that attracts more views than any other page. You can have your employees focus on outputting more blogs on topics that have been getting the most clicks and highest average session duration.

Analysis of The Analytics

google analytics logo

As you can see, all of these chosen analytics work together, but a company has to find the patterns and solutions to the problems they are seeing. While it may seem that monitoring just demographics or page views will not boost a business too much, the long tail effect comes into play by monitoring more and more analytics. As the world keeps embracing the technological changes in our society, more businesses will move to using customer analytics to improve business strategy and efficiency. Google analytics makes tracking your customers habits and desires that much easier too. These analytics are the best option for a company to get a well-rounded look at who, what, and where website traffic is coming from. They lay the platform for more analytics to be built on.

5 Creative Ways You Can Use Customer Service to Amp Up Your Online Marketing Strategy

Looking for some quick and easy tips to improve your online marketing strategy? Look no further. Customer service, a once again focused upon aspect in the business world, can improve your marketing with a few simple tricks. Stick around or read 7 Online Marketing Strategies to Maximize Website Visits, The Art of Killing Digital Advertising or 5 Ways Companies Have Used VR for Marketing.

Customer Service Hacks to Kill Your Online Marketing Campaign

1. Mix Your Marketing and Customer Service Team

customer service marketing post it

Marketing is the part of the business that brings customers in, while customer service is what keeps them there. For this reason, it only makes sense that the two work together. Companies also have a 60-70% chance of keeping old customers but only a 5-20% chance of gaining new ones. When the marketing and customer service group work together, you can target existing customers and save lots of money too!

2. Use Social Media as a Customer Service Tool

social media icons

Companies should see social media as a huge opportunity when it comes to advertising and customer service. People contact companies over Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram all the time. Just the other week, I was on a United Airlinesflight, and I had tweeted at them. They responded asking me how my flight was going within minutes. This is a great example of how customer service over marketing channels is so important. It shows to their followers how much they are invested in their customers and that they truly care. This also shows that the companies are up to date when it comes to interacting with customers. They are open to change and customers want to see companies that embrace change like they do.

3. Feature Customers on Social Media

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Another idea to boost your marketing campaign using customer service is through customer spotlights. Your company could pick a customer of the week. This could be through the amount they spent, the positive interactions they have with your company, or many other things. You could then post this through social media. This once again shows that the companies are invested in their customers and that they like to give back to the community.

4. Use Customer Reviews as Promotional Material on Social Media

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When it comes to showcasing your customer service team, what better way to do it than through customer reviews? Your company can prove to its customers that its product and customer service teams are actually rated highly. Best Buy is a company that does this very well. They post their reviews to social media, at stores, and in other online ads. It is proof that they have satisfied customers.

5. Give Special Opportunities to Special Customers

Across different industries, companies reward their valued customers differently. One company, BMW, gives customers who recently have purchased a car the opportunity of a lifetime. They invite them to BMW Days around the world and let them race their top-of-the-line cars. They will have all different types of cars, ranging from their M5’s to their I3’s. They let their customers go all out racing on the track for hours. They record these days, sending out these clips to social media. The services they provide their customers is something they will never forget. GM and Ford have similar days too that draw new customers in and keep existing customers happy. Other industries do this through their products. Tech companies invite customers to test out new products first and give feedback. This once again shows they take customer feedback seriously and then they can boast about it online. Lastly, smaller companies such as micro-breweries around the world invite customers to their locations and give tours and tastings. Half Acre Brewery, based in Chicago, USA, gives tours of their facilities and posts their reviews to social media. Time and time again, these companies get fantastic reviews and prove to their customers through online marketing that their customer service is world class.

Customer Service and Online Marketing

online marketing diagram

A company’s marketing team gets customers in the door, while customer service keeps them there. Using these customer service hacks for online marketing is a fantastic way for your company’s teams to work together. So if you’re looking to amp up your online marketing, merge your teams together, take to social media, highlight your customers, and boast about your customer reviews (only if you can back it up with facts). Most of these include social media in some way, shape or form, and that is why it is so easy to incorporate both your marketing team and customer service teams.  This increases both employee and customer happiness. If you are looking to read more into tracking your customers preferences and habits to better target them, head to 5 Customer Analytics You Should Be Measuring.

CTA marketing strategy template

Top 5 Secrets to Excellent Customer Service

A company’s most important feature, without a doubt, is its product. If there is no desire for the product, a business will not succeed. But what else makes companies stand out from others?

The secret lies in customer service.

Read on to find out about some secrets of customer service and one business, Woveon, that is truly a forerunner in this not-so-new industry.

Ways to Excellent Customer Service

1. Customer Loyalty

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To start off on our adventure to world-class customer service, it seems fitting to talk about customer loyalty. When a customer is loyal, they will keep buying products, turning into more and more revenue. But how does a company identify and keep these customers happy? At Woveon, identifying important customers and helping with their every need is easy! Woveon has created AI (Artificial Intelligence) programs that identify businesses-valued customers in multiple ways. Say someone has shopped at an e-commerce website multiple times and has a great buying history but has now run into some trouble. If they contact the store via multiple channels such as social media or email, a representative from the business can pull up their information and understand they are a valued customer. They can focus on their problems more quickly, and this keeps up customer satisfaction.

2. Consistency

Much like loyalty, consistency is another key factor when it comes to customer service. Woveon makes it easy for a customer service representative to be consistent throughout their interactions with customers. The software records past interactions that allows the business to recall past services it offered to the particular customer and the means by which the problem was resolved. With all of this data, the company can provide consistent help to valued customers. This, in turn, can create word-of-mouth interactions, generating new customers.

3. Knowledgeable Staff

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Nothing is more frustrating than calling customer service and feeling more apt than the “resourceful” representative. This is why it is so important to have knowledgeable staff who don’t just stick to a script and set of instructions. Your employees should be able to problem solve on their own. In order to do this, one should hire people who show interest in their business and understand its products. However, having knowledge on more than just the product is important. For smaller businesses, getting to know your customers and being able to talk with them more on a personal level can be very important. With Woveon’s technology, this is a walk in the park. Woveon’s recorded conversations not only help with consistency, but it can also help a customer service rep get to know the client more by reviewing past conversations. Although this may not apply to all businesses, small to mid-sized companies can really benefit from having personable customer service reps who are extremely knowledgeable about their product and clients. So before hiring any applicant, make sure he/she is enthusiastic about the product or service the company provides.

4. Response Time

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“Thank you for calling. Your call is very important to us today. Please hold while we transfer you to our next available representative.”

We’ve all heard this dreadful message. Five minutes later, you are still listening to the same terrible background music and just waiting for your questions to be answered. This is why it is so important to have urgency when conducting customer service. If you make a customer wait for five or more minutes, their frustration is almost sure to be rising as well. To help this problem, Woveon’s interface has a simple search bar that any customer service rep can pull up and see what the customer’s history is. It includes common problems the customer has had along with small subcategories, illustrated in a 3D model that is quick and easy to use. Woveon’s incredibly accessible database and easy-to-use software cut down time that the customer is forced to listen to background music and become frustrated. Having dealt with many customer service departments, I can say that the best way to keep a customer happy is to be fast and knowledgeable about all potential problems. But even if you can’t identify the problem right away, act with urgency and get the process started as soon as possible in order to retain strong customer loyalty.

5. Apologize and Move On

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Everyone makes mistakes–some you can control, others just happen. It is always better to apologize first and then move forward. When it comes to customer service, the representative is almost never to blame; however, the customer may think differently. A customer service rep should apologize not only for the inconvenience the customer is going through, but also so the customer can sense that the rep personally cares about the problem. If you are nice to your customers, they, in turn, would be more likely to reciprocate. Of course, there will be good and bad customers, but as long as you are willing to be upfront, apologize for any mistakes you could have made, and are ready to solve the problem, most customer interactions will go smoothly. Remember, solving the problem is only half of the interaction; being fast, knowledgeable, and polite completes the customer service process.

To help you out, here are 5 templates to get you out of sticky customer situations.

If you want to retain and build a bigger customer base, a company has to have great customer service. Word of mouth “advertisement” is 5x more powerful than any media ad. Because of this, a company’s customer service has to be efficient, knowledgeable, and polite. Luckily, with Woveon, customer service comes easy. Using Woveon’s software is a hack in itself when running a business, and if you are ready to bring your business to the next level, start with your customer service using Woveon.