What is excellence in customer service

Most organizations provide good customer service, but customers keep coming back to the ones that go beyond to provide service excellence. Customer service is where your brand comes to life. Another thing to keep in mind is that improving the sales of a product or service is not possible without continuously striving to redefine the standards of service excellence. People sign up for a product or service but stay for the customer experience. Pursuing excellence in customer service has benefits beyond just customer satisfaction.

Here are two benefits of centering your strategy around service excellence:. Here are the key ingredients of good service that can take your customer experience from good to great:. Providing convenience starts with taking steps towards understanding customer preferences, for instance — what time do they prefer to speak to executives, or what type of communication channel they prefer to use.

You should ensure that you are present on all modes of communication including chat, call, social media, etc. Also, make use of a customer support model that maximizes the availability of your agents so no matter when the customer contacts you there is an agent available to attend to them.

Customers appreciate the quickness of response since patience is not really a virtue in the customer service industry. Once you respond to a customer query, the speed of resolution also matters. While some problems are harder to solve, the faster you can fix them the better. A lack of required personnel to manage the volume of calls, too many manual tasks that slow your agents down are possible bottlenecks you should eliminate to achieve the desired speed of service.

One such example of this approach to customer service was demonstrated by Ritz Carlton. A customer mistakenly left his charger at their hotel while rushing to the airport. He planned to call them once he stepped into the office after landing, but when he got there, he found a package with not only his charger but an extra one just in case! Improve revenue growth. Improve customer experience. Improve customer support.

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Reduce your reliance on applications with Microsoft Teams integration and class leading customer contact management. At the end of the interaction, our feelings on the type of customer service we received will affect our overall perception of the business or organisation. And this can change with each interaction, whether it be visiting in person, calling a company, or contacting through a chat box or email enquiry.

If the initial level of service we received during purchase was outstanding — it also needs to be outstanding when we seek follow-up customer service with your contact centre. If our issues are not handled with customer service excellence at every step of our journey, and on every occasion, our initial warm fuzzy feeling will dissipate. Our perception about your company overall will shift, and may influence our decision to stay or go. Attitude is everything, and a positive attitude goes a long way in providing excellent customer service.

Since most customer interactions are not face-to-face, your attitude should be reflected in your language and tone of voice. Everyone has heard of the legendary customer service at Zappos. For example, they once sent a best man free shoes the night before the wedding after his order was sent to the wrong location due to a mistake by the delivery company.

Resolving customer queries as quickly as possible is a cornerstone of good customer service. Customers understand that more complex queries take time to resolve.

You should, too. That means they want to feel like more than just a ticket number. Customers want to interact with a person — not a company.

How about their interests or hobbies? Can you make them laugh? Your customers are the most integral part of your business, and they come before products or profit. Treat them like they are the center of your world — because they are.

So, get to know your customers. Humanize them. Humanize yourself. Southwest Airlines put this principle into practice in a very memorable way when one of its pilots held a flight back to wait for a customer traveling to a funeral.