Customer Service Experience: What it is and How to Improve It

The customer service experience is one of the most important aspects of a sales-driven business. When consumers have a good one, they are more likely to purchase again and to refer friends and family. This is all in addition to establishing a quality reputation as a business that takes care of those that work with them.

Customer experience is different from good customer service, in any case. While customer service is a bit more “after-the-sale” focused, a holistic customer service experience includes the entire customer journey. By refining this experience, businesses can increase the lifetime value of their customers while making them happier and building a book of referral business.

To help businesses get started, we are going to cover the following:

Let’s dive into each and get some actionable next steps for business leaders looking to improve their operations.

What Is the Customer Service Experience?

The customer service experience is how a business designs the customer journey, from first contact to post-sale support. The key to making a typical customer service system into a holistic customer service experience is to look at this process as a cycle instead of a linear progression that ends after the customer has purchased a product unless they have a question or complaint. The following cycle should be the basic framework of a customer journey:

Customer service cycle

By using this as the foundation of customer service management, businesses craft a journey that doesn’t end but feeds into another business cycle. While not every customer will purchase again, this ensures that every customer wants to meet their needs. The cycle also doesn’t need to include the initial customer, as a satisfied customer can often lead to a referral sale from somebody they know.

The Best Ways To Improve It

Customer service management is complex, and there are a number of nuances that can be changed to improve the experience, but focusing on the right things can result in more positive change within a tighter timeframe.

The most effective ways to rapidly improve a business’s customer service experience include:

  • Improving customer service training
  • Providing customer surveys after the sale
  • Implementing a customer service management software platform

Improve Customer Service Training

Customer service training is necessary to ensure that associates know how to handle customer concerns in a friendly, informative, and timely manner. This doesn’t involve just being kind and understanding but also ensuring that responses on any platform are succinct while still providing the customer with the necessary information to solve their issue.

Most businesses understand this but are still unsure how to improve their training. The best ways are:

  • Provide more frequent training
  • Incorporate live roleplay for email, phone, and in-person scenarios at least once a month
  • Allow management to send in test requests to see how quickly and kindly their associates can give a satisfactory response

All of these are surefire ways to improve the way that staff interact with consumers. Unfortunately, roleplay is one of the most neglected. Still, it is arguably the most important, as it pulls them out of a theoretical headspace and more effectively provides experience responding to questions and concerns than any other training method.

Provide Customer Surveys

Surveys are a great way to allow consumers to provide feedback for businesses that aren’t sure exactly what they need to fix to improve their customer experience. Unfortunately, businesses that don’t offer surveys are often left searching their reviews, which only provide a glimpse of the happiest and most disgruntled consumers. While this can help identify more obvious issues, the nuances of the customer experience are often missed unless consumers are prompted with specific questions about them.

Implement a Customer Service Management Software Platform

The fastest and most comprehensive way to completely revolutionize the customer service experience is to implement a software platform based on proven frameworks and best practices for customer service. Instead of crafting a quality customer experience from scratch, this software gives business leaders a holistic foundation for organizing customer information, creating workflows, routing tickets, and providing more comprehensive support.

By automating the logistics of customer service, these software tools enable customer service associates to focus more on what their human touch and training are needed for, like direct contact with consumers and proactive support through check-in calls and cross/upsells.

Vivantio offers a platform that provides all of this functionality and more.

Improve the Customer Service Experience with Vivantio

While each of the benefits listed in this article work wonders for businesses, they won’t help if managers choose a platform that doesn’t offer all of the necessary features. Vivantio offers a cutting-edge customer service software platform that offers everything listed and more, including:

  • Endless integrations to make implementation easy
  • Automatic ticket routing to ensure every ticket gets to the proper agent
  • Workflow designer tool that allows managers to customize the framework of their CS operations without any technical knowledge required
  • White label service portals so businesses can maintain a cohesive brand throughout the service process
  • A holistic view of each client to ensure that no agent is left without vital information

For businesses looking to bring their customer experience into the modern age, Vivantio is a no-brainer option.

For more than two decades, Vivantio has been helping clients optimize their service organizations by leveraging a unified service management platform. To find out how Vivantio can help you improve the customer service experience, contact our team today or register for a free demo.

Share This Story!

FREE GUIDE

Get the roadmap that puts your customer service at the center of your company’s business strategy.