In a competitive market, the customer is king. As an organisation, the surest way to thrive in the ecommerce industry is to keenly listen to our clients. Through our customers’ feedback, we are able to reassess, re-strategize and improve on various sectors of our company to enhance its ability to serve our cherished customers.
Overlooked Treasure
Through surveys, and reviews, organizations garner feedback from users. The feedback is piped to organisations through the customer service department. Investopedia explains customer service as “The process of ensuring customer satisfaction with a product or service.” Thus, the sole aim of customer service is to ensure that the customer has a positive experience with products or services. The department achieves this by crafting feedback methods such as sending out surveys and making calls. Managers and other company heads usually fail to exploit the feedback hoard; that is, the customer service agent themselves. Every effort including working overtime or weekends, exchanging emails and doing research is intended to leave a lasting imprint in the minds of customers service representatives.
It so happens that, only an average of 10% -15% of our customers will take time to respond to our surveys. So even dealing with feedback from our surveys, companies could probably shoot off-target by over 70%. Customers often approach service representatives with raw needs and questions. They don’t anticipate further use of their communication outside getting their issues addressed. These pure and unfiltered concerns are channeled directly to your support agents.
Mining The Treasure
In using customer service representatives as a client feedback resource, we at Kudobuzz sit back with agents and ask their opinions on upcoming features or where to focus most on, to heighten customer satisfaction. Another efficient way we make use of customer service knowledge is to encourage agents to write out feature suggestions. It is important to involve customer support agents in decisions such as a change in pricing or policy. Most service agents can almost accurately predict possible reactions to new changes. Therefore, they come in handy when rolling out new changes as they are able to assist in coming up with palatable methods of dissemination and presentation, which will make things easier for customers to ease into change.
As an organisation, the closest you can accurately read the minds of your customers is through your CS agents. Some organizations try to get feedback from customer service agents through questionnaires and reports. While this will give you some feedback, taking away the formality of it and making CS staff feel valued and integral of the company goes a long- way to bring the best out of CS agents. When people feel like they just have to churn out reports for the “higher ups”, they’re not as enthusiastic or perceptive as they would be if it were an informal interaction. Simply put, give your CS agents quality customer service. Spend some time at lunch with them. Ask what users are worried about, tell them about a new change or feature you plan on rolling out and hear their feedback. Also, ask them to study a trend with customers and recommend helpful solutions; and once you get this information, don’t just sit on it! Deliberate and implement them in the best way for your organization.
After reading this, I hope that you will now look at your customer service agents with fresh perspective. Take a minute to pay them some customer service and reap their insightful, honed knowledge of customer needs and preferences. Try out these simple methods and your company and customers will be all the better for it.
