Customer service has long been neglected by many companies. But times have changed and the same applies to customer service.
In this blog post, we explain how you can provide excellent customer service and take your business to the next level.
Here we go!
Why you should offer the best customer service
Each of us is a customer. And we, as customers, are familiar with the feeling of chaotic help centers and confusing contact forms. And yet, this feeling is recurrent on many corporate websites.
Customer service is nowadays no longer an option, but a must-have. Why?
Because our website visitors, users and customers are also our most important influencers at the same time. Therefore, it is no longer optional but absolutely important to take requests and difficulties from users seriously in order to enable long-term positive customer relationships.
At the same time, as everyone strives to develop their product as well as possible, we also have an obligation to provide the best customer service.
Today, we want to share with you five tips that have helped us at Usersnap in terms of customer service.
1. Distribute responsibility to your team
As a small company or start-up, you have to take care of many different things right in the start-up phase. These are u. a. Product development, market introduction, team development, marketing and customer acquisition.
At the same time, it is important that you offer good customer service for your first users and customers right from the start. The best way to distribute different tasks that customer service brings to your team. But why exactly is this worthwhile and how can you start with it?
There are a few reasons why excellent customer service is an excellent growth hacking tool:
- If you’re developing an innovative product, you’ll probably spend a lot of time explaining your product to new users. A clear explanation or “tour” on your website helps new customers to find their way around faster and allows for greater customer satisfaction. From the beginning.
- Customer service means asking customers what you think: When you develop a new product, you may want to run a variety of market and product tests to ask potential customers about your product. Beta testing with prospective customers is a great way to get in touch with your audience and receive feedback and feedback on optimization.
- Talk to your users: When thinking about a strategy for your product launch, think about the channels you can best reach your customers. Also the medium (from social networks like Facebook, Twitter or Xing to e-mail or phone) can be crucial for a successful customer relationship.
2. Get started with great customer service: email, chat and phone support
Customer feedback can be overwhelming, especially at the beginning. But a wealth of feedback and feedback is a good sign! Because that means that your customers deal with your product. Your customers have taken time to write or call you.
However, if you answer emails and answer calls for hours every day, think of an alternative. For e-mail support, it’s a good idea to work with e-mail templates that include:
- We have received your email
- We process your request
- Example answers for problems with the product itself
- Templates for product restrictions
- Answers for requests to delete an account
- Answers for general feedback from your users
- Productivity tips for users
- Answers in which you would like to thank your users for feedback or the like
Despite these templates, every e-mail should be individualized. Nevertheless, you save a lot of time by using these templates. At the beginning, it’s certainly enough to set up a Google Doc for email templates that can be shared with other team members as needed.
Telephone support
While customer service in the US market mostly works via e-mail or chat, telephone support in the German market is still expected today.
The possibility of personal contact via telephone arouses confidence that can not be achieved by stating an e-mail address to the same extent. Therefore, always, especially if you want to address medium-sized companies or customers over 35+, always telephone support.
Support via chat
Another way to provide real-time customer service is through chat. Here, customers have the opportunity to get in touch with your company in real time. Providers are z. B. Clickdesk, Userlike or Zopim. An overview of all providers can be found here.
3. Make it easier for your new customers to star
Optimizing your customer service means not least communicating with your customers. At Usersnap, we’re working hard to make it easier for our new customers to get started, and to help them get started by integrating Usersnap into their workflow.
These things, which could also be helpful to your customer service, have helped us further:
- Setting up an e-mail marketing funnel for your lead nurturing strategy
- The segmentation of your users by activity
- Help users with little or no activity to use your product
- Help active users be more productive by providing productivity hacks and tips
- Direct questions to your customers about how they can help you
- Addressing users via various channels (e-mail, chat, telephone or social media). Ultimately, it is about finding a form of communication that is easy and pleasant for the user
We at Usersnap have recently optimized the following things in our customer service:
- We offer help as soon as someone registers for our service
- 5 days after sign-up we offer further information on the use of our product
- We specifically ask users why they are not using our tool they have registered for
Our experience is that honesty is absolutely important when it comes to customer service. Ask honestly for customer feedback, your users will appreciate that.
4. Explain your product
When it comes to good customer service, a simple, intuitive product explanation is essential. In a product tour or an info section, your users should find hints and tips about your product in a central location.
This simplifies access and should be beneficial to your conversions. This is not only helpful to your customers, but also when you hire new people who can find out about your product centrally. Consider detailed product explanation as an enhanced customer service and as a place to define your product.
5. 24/7 customer service – does that have to be?
You have launched your product and your business is growing and growing. Especially in this phase, customer support around the clock is most likely not your first concern. On the other hand, faster customer support has proven to be one of the most important growth hacking tools.
And this not only applies to large companies but also to medium-sized companies and startups.
Buffer writes about this topic, for example, about his vision to offer “a super helpful social media management tool with excellent customer service”.
The good news is that you do not have to offer 24/7 customer service. It already helps your customers if you offer the following:
- Tell your customers how to contact you (via e-mail, telephone, social media).
- Instruct your customers about your availability with exact time information.
- With automatic messages, you can bridge the time until you can answer inquiries personally.
- Point out helpful resources such as For example, FAQs so that your users can independently find a solution to their problem.
Tools that deliver outstanding customer service
In this blog post I showed you in 5 simple steps what you can do to deliver outstanding customer service. Helpful for this are some tools that I would like to introduce to you:
- Zendesk
- Inbox from Zendesk (quite a new project from Zendesk for managing team emails)
- Intercom
- Salesforces
- Desk
- Freshdesk
- Usersnap
Just try out which tools work best for you and your team.
Summary
Customer service can be relatively expensive at the beginning, but it is one of the most important growth hacking tools. Satisfied customers are customers who recommend your business.
Honest customer feedback allows you to optimize your product and grow as a business. We as a company can learn from our customers and help them find the solution they are looking for.
What is your experience with your customer service? We are happy if you leave us a comment!
We at Usersnap hope you enjoyed this post and are happy if you follow us on Twitter. There we regularly tweet about web development, web design and customer service.
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