“No plan survives after the first contact with the enemy.” Likewise, few companies can survive the first contact with a customer if not properly prepared. Smart entrepreneurs and business owners need to know that as soon as they open their doors to customers, the fundamental structure of their business can change.
Your customers will call you and your executives, interact with them, and even anger. But in fact, each interaction (good or bad) across all channels provides information on how the company can improve. Here are 5 ways customer interaction can improve your business.
Five things your business can improve through customer interaction:
- Customer satisfaction
- Teaching method
- Customer recovery
- Employee motivation
- Operating procedure
1. Improve customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is the key to any successful business. Learning how to create a positive customer experience while maintaining your company’s culture is a top priority for successful customer satisfaction. The interactions with each customer not only provide insight into the experience of a particular customer but also add another point of data about overall customer satisfaction.
Service representatives can help you guess what your customers want, but the only thing that gives you the true vision you need is “on the spot” interaction. In some industries, such customer happiness can ultimately lead to huge cost and savings for the company.
2. Improve teaching methods
Most customer satisfaction centers have a call recording feature that resembles conversations in live chat, and one of the most powerful uses of this call recording is to record your best customer service interactions and use them to educate others. When hard-to-reach customers appear and the interactions come up with a great solution, you can use it as a case study and make it part of your training program.
One of the biggest advantages of having highly engaged customers is that the people who engage provide suggestions, ideas and thoughts for every aspect of the company. By having management hear these ideas, you can improve your support agent training.
3. Improve customer recovery
Customer recovery. No one wants to hear the word, but it also happens to those with the best intentions. In short, it’s a technique that makes angry customers stop going to another company or yelling.
Anyone who has ever done customer service will have encountered an angry customer (often on a variety of channels). By listening to that customer’s concerns, your rep learns a little about how to better handle the next interaction. Unfortunately, the best experience is learning through trials. Employees can grow through these ordeals.
4. Improving employee motivation
If everyone on your support team is committed to improving customer satisfaction by learning through interactions with customers, you will be more motivated because fewer customers are angry. If you don’t feel attacked in every interaction, your morale will increase and your employees will be more motivated.
The more motivated you are, the better customer service you create, creating a virtuous cycle that benefits everyone in your organization. After all, a smile works to calm a ferocious beast.
5. Improvement of operating procedures
When a company wants to learn from the customer support team, its operating procedures start to change. All success stories observed in customer interactions are structured within the company culture. These improved operational procedures can always be modified and tuned for more success on the customer side and within the business. All you need is a willingness to create new practices and encourage their adoption.
In the end, having a customer support team that listens to and respects customers is critical to developing a great business culture. The experience you get when dealing with customers is critical to developing and maintaining a successful business.
