Responding quickly to customer questions is key to adding value to your clients and maintaining a good relationship. I’ve dealt with enough real estate agents, lawyers and insurance brokers in my time to know that responsiveness is what separates the good ones from the bad. When your business involves frequent interactions with your clients, your sole objective is to be as fast as possible to respond with the right answers. Every sales and customer service team should be obsessed with a client first approach.
However, this happy medium of a quick and qualitative response is not always easy to find, and sometimes the requests end up accumulating and generating significant stress. In this article, we will review the 10 points to master in order to avoid being overwhelmed and ensure a flawless customer follow-up!
While some questions may take some time to answer, quickly responding back with “Thanks for your question. I’m looking into this now. I’ll get back to you in the next 30 minutes.”
Your customer is aware that the processing of his request may take you some time. Having said that, acknowledging receipt is a game changer. It’s why I love group text messaging so much.
Do you know how many times I’ve heard “Wow! I don’t usually say this, but your service is impeccable!”
People are used to having to chase, get frustrated and rarely connect to brands. 91% of customers who are unhappy with a brand will just leave without complaining.
While you’re watching Netflix at night, what’s a few seconds to respond to a client that could lead to a sale or simply deliver happiness to existing clients. Don’t be part of the 91%.
Being responsive is one thing, but it’s a must to add value at each customer interaction. Sending a confusing message can be frustrating for your client. Every word, phrase, message must add value and move the needle towards a sale or happiness.
With Textodog, you can add an internal note and assign yourself to a conversation to let your co-workers know that you are handling the request.
Don’t leave anything vague after the exchange with your client, whether by chat, text, email or by phone. Ask specific questions about anything that is not clear to you and be sure your clients understand how your products and services work. It’s about securing the client and avoiding disappointments. As a business owner, you must communicate that your products and services are not for everyone. Your staff must communicate potential problems.
For example, in my tour company, when we have tours from Montreal to New York City, we drop everyone off in front of the Empire State Building. If you are staying in Manhattan, you must walk with your luggage or take a taxi. Most people expect us to drive them to the hotel. The problem we have is that some of our clients are staying at a New Jersey hotel and the driver must respect his rules not to drive so many consecutive hours. If the bus driver exceeds the number of allows hours, the bus must park along the highway until the next morning. It’s not the experience we want for our customers staying in New Jersey.
With that said, we explain to our customers that we give you the choice of many hotels and if we had to drive around New York City by bus, some customers would be frustrated being the last ones to be dropped off. For all these reasons, we explain the product and services we offer in a clear way.
With group text messaging, we inform everyone part of a transaction about the potential downfalls of our products and services. We said a “Things you must know”. With group text messaging, if someone who’s not informed starts to complain, other on the text message can tell them that they did tell us about it and they must have received it. It stops the complaining and the customer can focus on the positive aspects of their weekend.
So, with a thorough knowledge of the context and issues of the customer’s request, you will have a better idea of who to talk to, and for what purpose. The second part of your work will then flow more naturally and quickly, as you will be more comfortable and responsive in developing your feedback to your client.
Be sure to have a good CRM and great communication tools to communicate in a meaningful way. Email is slow and I’m personally annoyed when I need to fill out a form to contact a company. I usually don’t fill out the form and look for a competitor. A form to me screams “Fill me out and I’ll never get back to you.”
Chat on the other hand is great because I can speak to a live agent and get my answers right away. When I get my answers right away as a consumer, I feel like if I ever have a problem with their products and services, I can get a hold of someone right away. This secures me and motivates me to click the buy button.
I’m also not a fan of chat bots. If you’re like me, a chatbot feels like the company is trying to skip out on chatting with you. It feels as if I walked into a store and some robot was there to answer my questions and all I really want is to talk to someone. Furthermore, a chat bot most often gives answers I didn’t ask for. It can be a frustrating experience to say the least. If you do have a need for a chat bot, be sure to make it very simple. “Would you like to speak to sales or customer service?” and then join them to a live agent right away.
Regarding your CRM, it’s important to select one that is easy to use, that easily connects to Zapier and that offers marketing automation. I love marketing automation but, it must feel as humanly possible.
As a manager or business owner, you must emphasize the need to update all contact information in the CRM. Systems are great if they are used correctly. Show me a great CEO and I’ll see someone who has great systems with all employees using them correctly.
It’s critical to have employees that care about data. It’s the only way you can use these systems to build meaningful long term relationships with your customers.
In my tour company, if I notice that a client’s birthday falls in the weekend they are traveling with us, the agent must pick up on it, express how happy you are for them to travel and spend time with their loved ones on their birthday. The critical part is to note their file and let the tour guide know they are celebrating their birthday on X date. The tour guide can announce it on the microphone and everyone on the bus can sign happy birthday to them.
It’s the little things that matter and systems will empower your staff to wow clients.
In all your customer touch points, you must never make your customers feel like a robot is serving them. Personalization is critical when sending emails. We want to make our clients feel like we’re speaking to them and not at them. One of the secrets to sales and outstanding brands is authenticity. This comes from being yourself and showing the personality of your brand while addressing your clients.
I once walked into the airport and saw Wesjet airlines employees all wearing jeans and cowboy hats. I thought, these guys are great. It may not be for everyone and that’s ok. Attracting and repelling is what makes great brands because they’re full of personality.
Education has always been part of sales. The more your customers know, the more likely they are to buy your products. I’m doing right now because if you read this far, it probably means you’re learning something and you may start to see the value of group text conversations. Our software facilitates you delivering happiness to your clients by including everyone part of a transaction in the same conversation.
When a customer calls us to get more information about our tours, the only job we have as an agent is to educate our customer and remove any barrier before they give us their Visa or Mastercard. If some of the barriers are show stoppers, that’s fine too. All you really want is to make sure that they understand our product and the expectation is set.
This is way sales managers must spend daily meeting with their sales agents to discuss the products and services they sell. We want happy customers, referrals and repeat business.
Every customer touch point can be make or break your business. The definition of branding to me is how a customer feels about your brand after each interaction. It’s basically what they tell others when you’re not around.
If you have to make calls to customers, be sure your sales team is aware to brainstorm their answer and expect objections. Be empathetic throughout each correspondence you have with customers and have a well thought out answers. Encourage your sales team to get with others to brainstorm before sending emails, text messages, phone calls and chat messages.
If I had to summarize this article in one sentence, it would be this: be available, responsive, thorough and be proactive! That’s the secret to delivering happiness.
Every customer touch point can be make or break your business. The definition of branding to me is how a customer feels about your brand after each interaction. It’s basically what they tell others when you’re not around.
Before we do a deep dive, we need to focus on existing business challenges. 80% of CEOs believe they offer amazing customer experiences, but only 8% of their customers agree with them. The reason I mention this is that it may be difficult to find problems with your existing customer touch points.
This is the ultimate question to ask yourself, honestly.
With that answer, which business goals would you like to work on? Choose one.
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Acquire more customers
Increase Sales
Increase Cross-Sales
Improve Customer Reviews and Recommendations
Improve Customer Service
Improve Communication
Improve Operations Efficiency
This is where we determine an outcome so we can measure success.
If I had to summarize this article in one sentence, it would be this: be available, responsive, thorough and be proactive! That’s the secret to delivering happiness.
