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uccessful business ventures are often an outcome of great customer service standards! This might not make the news but it’s worth repeating. Believe it or not. You can make customers fall in love with your business. And, customer service executives play a vital role in achieving this goal. In a highly competitive business environment where customer engagement rules are changing, it’s just not enough to set the right customer service standards. Instead, to retain and acquire new customers, a lot depends on the rules for conduct that dictates how you want your customers to perceive their experience with your brand. 60% of enterprises consider customer service as the top priority for their business. At this point, if you are falling behind customer support expectations, you will be out of the business in no time!

Importance of customer service standards

So, how important is customer service standards for your business? Did you know that 90% of consumers trust online brand recommendations while 62% search for brand reviews before a product purchase? Inarguably, having a group of happy and satisfied customers is one of the best ways for your brand to make it to the top. Essentially, brands are going out of the way in their uphill battle for customers to achieve customer service standards and excellence. Why? Because customer service standards define the relationship between you and your client. That is to say, customers tweet about customer service and talk about you to their friends, family, relatives, and acquaintances.

Therefore, the key to a successful business is to improve the customer’s full range of experiences throughout the product or service lifecycle. Hence, regardless of the products that you deliver or the services you provide, if your customer support standards are not high, you stand nowhere!

Defined customer service standards will take you higher

Promptness, Politeness, Professional, and Personal – Well if you think that these are mere words, you are wrong. In fact, the rationale is- with a defined metric, you can compare and improve the effectiveness of the customer support team.

customer service standards

‘Delivery in three days’, ‘calls answered in 20 seconds’- if your customer service goes over and beyond the ‘call on duty’, you will never go wrong. But have you set the factors that you are going to address in a standard? Well, listing out the acceptable standards will not only help your employees measure their KPIs but also help you set the customer expectations right. Remember that nothing impresses the customer more if a brand goes beyond the ‘call on duty’ to fulfill the promise or the expectation set. Hence, formalizing customer support standards is an important exercise that needs to be communicated to all the employees within the organization. To help you out, some of the formal customer care standards are:

  • Timeliness
  • Accuracy
  • Quality
  • Courtesy
  • Effectiveness
  • Problem-solving, and
  • Completeness

It’s important to ensure that customer service rules and standards are specific, measurable, concise and correspond to the customer requirements. After all, when customers patronize a business, they measure the quality and the customer support that you provide to each and every customer.

3 remarkable ways to revamp your Customer service standards

If you are truly customer-centric, set the customer expectations right! Customers have more product choices and services available than ever before. If they don’t see value with your service, they can switch brands anytime. Remember it’s 25 times costlier to gain a new customer, unlike an existing one. If you set customer expectations and then exceed them, not only you earn a new customer for life but also you earn customer loyalty in the long run.

To keep up your business level and outcast competitors, it’s crucial that the standards on average are upgraded and improving. This will help you ensure a positive response from customers and turn potential prospects and leads into loyal customers and brand ambassadors.

To start with, here are 3 customer service areas to revamp your customer care standards that can fetch outstanding results:

1. Speedy response

The # 1 rising customer expectation about the customer support standard of today is Speed. Gone are the days when response times to customer inquiries were 24 hours. Whether service delivery, product delivery, services or call, customers demand quick resolution to a problem. That is to say, apart from efficiency and accuracy, consistently fast delivery is the need of the hour. Customers hate waiting which means delays and slow service is no longer acceptable. Hence, the best way to ramp up your customer service standard is to feed the need for speed of customers.

2. Social media

Are you listening to your customers socially? Did you know that 67% of customers today turn to social media for their customer support needs? While customers can connect you via diverse channels such as live chat, email, phone, etc. one such popular channel is social media. Social media customer care service is nothing but the practice of providing customer support through social media channels. For example, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram that brands use to quickly resolve customer issues. Henceforth, this is an excellent opportunity for brands to maximize their exposure as well as resolve customer queries as quickly as possible.

3. Self-service

Today’s tech-savvy customers demand speedy service and switch brands the moment they feel that that business undervalued their time. Given that customers love to find answers to their problems themselves, they prefer self-service over the customer support agent. In fact, 81% of customers try self-service before approaching a brand. Therefore, it’s imperative that the customers gain more control over their accounts, find the answers themselves and fix the issue. What more. Automated self-service channels such as self-checkout portals, help centers, FAQs, online customer communities, etc. can serve a long way to maximize customer satisfaction. Besides, self-service customer support also improves brand reputation while driving brand revenue growth.

To sum up, delivering high-quality service is the only customer success mantra. With raising bars of customer service standards every day, its crucial to keep pace with your customers by reviewing customer care standards from time to time.

Want to improve return on your customer support service efforts and maximize engagement? Reach out to us to help you gain a competitive edge.