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Do you want a strong and lifelong relationship with your customers? Are you striving hard to earn brand loyalty? An important factor for winning the trust of customers is respecting their time. Customers these days are weary of customer service wait time, waiting to get served, waiting to get their complaints registered, waiting to get issues resolved, waiting to get their expectations fulfilled. According to Voice Response Inc. 34 percent of the customers who hang up because of long hold times never call back. Keeping your customers waiting results in straining your relationship with them and can cost your business a huge amount of money annually. So if you really want your customers to stay loyal to your brand and stick with you for a longer time period, value their time. Here are some tips to start off with!

Speed and Convenience is What Every Customer Wants

One of the many reasons customers switched to online shopping is the ease and time saving option with which they can buy products/avail services. When it comes to understanding customers’ expectations and needs the two essentials that every customer wants are a speedy service and convenience to make a purchase. Prioritize speedy service and customer convenience as the core values of your brand and see how they go a long way in building a lasting relationship with your customers. For instance if you have an online grocery store, customers would expect the check out and billing procedures to be simple and a quick door step delivery within minimum time. Make the online and in store shopping experience for your customers delightful by offering them quick and accessible service.

Map the Customer Journey to Effectively Reduce Wait Time

Customer journey mapping is a great technique to effectively reduce wait time for customers at various touch points. For instance you can accurately calculate the hold time for a customer call or the product/service delivery time and check for the loopholes that need improvement, it can be fewer resources or some unnecessary procedures that are contributing towards an annoying customer service wait time. Customer journey mapping allows you to improve the customer experience and you can use this tool smartly to improve your employee productivity as well. The best way to make the most out of this technique is to apply it at various touch points of customer interaction, this way you will be able to come up with a strategy for improving the speed of your service.

Quick Customer Service is a Huge Competitive Advantage

The velocity of your customer service can turn out to be a striking competitive advantage for your business. It can win you brand advocates. Going the extra mile for serving a customer quickly who is in a hurry or trouble would earn your business countless new customers through word of mouth advertising.

If you offer your customers quick service, prompt solutions to their queries and instant compensation in case of an issue/complaint you are likely to become one of those businesses that customers love to talk about in person and on social media. Even small things like rewarding your customers immediately without making them wait for a lucky draw, a contest, anniversary celebrations or special day festivities would give them a gesture that you don’t like to keep your customers waiting even for a gift.

Resolve Issues and Complaints in Minimal Time

Making the customers wait for registering a complaint and resolving a service issue are mistakes that can ruin a customer brand relationship. If a customer comes up to you and has a complaint for a wrong order or had a product damaged during the shipping process, instead of making him/her wait, offer an instant solution. If you quickly resolve a customer complaint it will make him/her feel valued and is likely to earn you a customer for life along with helping you with creating brand affinity.

Offer Time Saving Options for a Gratifying Customer Experience

There are a number of time saving service options that you can utilize to improve the quality and speed of your service. For example self-service and drive thru are two popular ways to save customers’ time. Depending upon the sort of business you have, you can come up with smart time saving options for your customers. For instance if you are running an ice cream parlor, you can have separate counters for kids, girls and couples. Self-service can be another option to facilitate the customers and you can have a special counter for takeaways to ensure that none of your customers have to wait. At the end what customers really remember about a business is its on time service!