Customer Service Excellence: 4 Best Practices

Customer service is one of the most topical issues in the world of business and entrepreneurship. Customer services refers to all interactions between a customer and a product or service provider both at the time of sale and afterwards. Every business must prioritize customer service because it forms part of the perceived value of a product or service. It is also important to appreciate that customer service expectations keep perpetually rising. It is interesting to note that in 2024 (and beyond), a blend of artificial intelligence and the human touch in customer service are increasingly becoming imperative. Let us look at some of the best practices in order to deliver customer service excellence. 

Being Customer-Centric Through & Through

In a business, being customer-centric should not be confined to just some departments e.g. sales and marketing. Customer-centricity should be the company culture of any business or startup. If we are to be honest after all, the literal existence of any enterprise is due to the customers. Thus everything should be done with the customer in mind. 

Be obsessed with providing the best customer experiences indiscriminately. What does the customer want or need? What do they prefer? What are they saying? These are some of the questions you should always actively seek to answer daily. Remember, in order to ingrain customer-centricity seamlessly you must make it a culture in your business or startup. 

Being Proactive

Sure enough customers will often point out things to you. It may be through enquiries, requests, complaints, queries, suggestions, recommendations, and so on. Addressing all that as and when it comes is noble and must be prioritised. It is actually part of that thrust to being a business or startup that is proactive. However, there is another layer to it that you must also endeavour to add. That is, anticipating your customers’ needs and addressing them before they even say anything. 

Being an enterprise that actively listens pays dividends in this regard. There is a lot customers say in not only what they say but even more so in what they do. Customers love it when their needs are anticipated beforehand. If you do it so well, you may even address needs customers may have never thought they had to begin with. It is just like a nursing mother who masters the ability to anticipate her infant child’s needs. That is what customer service should look like. 

Collecting & Acting On Customer Feedback

You cannot deliver the best customer service without customer feedback; it is impossible. There are lots of feedback loops that always exist for any business or startup. At the most basic it is unsolicited and there are lots of insights to learn from that feedback. However, it is more rewarding to come up with ways to actively solicit and collect feedback from customers. This adds the dynamic of making customers feel important. As in, when a customer sees you requesting for feedback, they interpret that as having a voice that matters. 

Customers always want to bask in the knowledge that you consider what they have to say. You can use strategies such as polls, surveys, collecting testimonials, focus group discussions, and so on. Social media platforms are powerful platforms to use for collecting feedback this way. Then when all is said and done you must act on the provided feedback. That is what seals everything. When you do that, customer service excellence becomes the inevitable outcome all the time. 

Providing Omnichannel Support

When dealing with omnichannel support we are looking at you enabling customers to seamlessly interact with your enterprise across a wide range of devices and or touch-points. Just to paint a picture: let us suppose a customer initiates contact with your business or startup via a voice call. It could be an enquiry or complaint they could be making. Then later on they probably follow up with an email. Then some time later they may contact you regarding the matter via your website’s chatbot. 

The ideal scenario should be that all those interactions should seamless. The customer must not reintroduce the issue whenever they change a communication channel. Your enterprise must be keeping tracking of each interaction so that it essentially progresses despite the channel used. Omnichannel support is and should be two-pronged. One, you must have it; customers should be able to contact you via several options. Two, there must be seamless integration and tracking of interactions made. 

In all these best practices always remember theindispensable role of data analytics. We now live in a world where there is lots of data being generated. This is especially so in interactions between businesses or startups and customers. This can be via websites and or social media platforms. The data analytics provided by those platforms are rich in insights that inform on sure ways to attain customer service excellence. This is because the insights will be contextual and unbiased. In your quest to always deliver customer service you must always be empirical in your approaches. Data analytics is your go-to for that.