Examples of Great Customer Service

Home
examples of great customer service

EXAMPLES OF GREAT CUSTOMER SERVICE

By now, I assume everyone knows that your company’s customer service needs to be both professional and excellent if you want to build and maintain a successful business. 78% of transactions are bailed on because of poor customer service – that’s a lot of income being thrown out the window. And to fix this, it takes about 12 positive experiences to cover for a bad one – how are you going to convince someone that had a bad experience with you to give you another try, when you need 12 to change their minds completely?

On the flip / positive side, loyal customers are worth about 10 times as much as the value of their initial purchase.

So how often do you go above and beyond to ensure your customers are satisfied? How do you stand yourself out as a source of good – no great customer service?

1. Customer Experience Must Be Unified And Consistent

More than ever before, businesses now have more channels and avenues that they can use to resolve customer complaints; the options range from the traditional call center services to social media, messaging, SMS, live online chat, and even self-service. However, it isn’t enough to just have these channels. Having multiple means of contacting you doesn’t resolve your customer’s issues; you or your employees or your outsource support desk partner must deliver a delightful experience across all platforms.

This means that customers who contact you via social media, for instance, will get the same level of knowledge, empathy, and responsiveness that they would have gotten from the traditional call centers.

How many resources have you put into your websites’ live chat platform? Are there discrepancies in the answers your customers get via different platforms? Will I get a certain answer via email and a different one via phone call? How consistent are you across all platforms?

2. Your Social Media Presence Needs To Be Robust And Responsive

It is not enough to have Twitter and Facebook pages, they have to be active and run in a way that encourages customers to reach out and ask questions or post a complaint at any time and be sure to get a fast response. A recent study shows that about 30% of customers will share their positive experience on social media and that over 66% of prospective customers pay attention to these reviews – you wouldn’t want the reviews in question to be negative now do you? You should also always consider your brand reputation – that alone is reason enough to offer great services.

3. Reduce Wait Times To The Bare Minimum

69% of the time, the speed of complaint resolution is the first thing that comes to the clients’ minds when they try to recount how they were served. And this is understandably so because I don’t think anyone likes waiting. Customer service is all about providing solutions to customers as soon as possible – you should walk towards reducing wait time.

4. Your Agents Need To Be Empathetic

A lot of customers consider empathy to be one major factor when rating customer service. They also want customer service that is free of unnecessary frustrations like having to be placed on hold or having to repeat said issue to multiple customer service representatives.

Examples of Great Customer Service

Below, I’d like to talk about 4 customer service stories that blew me away when I first read them. They are perfect examples of customer service reps going over and beyond to make sure the customer is happy. The brands are quite popular – Zappos, American Express, Rackspace, and Trader Joes – and with service like this, no one is surprised they’ve grown so much.

The Zappos Purse Rescue

This first story is the story of a young couple’s encounter with Zappos, whose core value is to “Deliver WOW Through Service”.

This recently married couple was packing up to move and while the husband was packing, he put all of his wife’s jewelry inside one of her purses, this purse was then put inside what he believed was an extra Zappos box. Unknown to him, his wife was planning to return that purse – in that box to Zappos! She eventually returns the box without knowing that it had her jewelry collection worth thousands of dollars!

When they got to their new home, she noticed that her jewelry collection was missing. After clearing up what happened with her husband, she reached out to a Zappos rep who then reroutes the box directly to his desk. Immediately it arrives, the rep decides to buy a plane ticket and go hand deliver it himself since he didn’t any of her pieces to get damaged or go missing in transit. Wow!

American Express Saves The Day

American Express has a lot of great customer service stories, but the one that really stands out to me – that I’ll be sharing today – is the one where a hotel café manager asks the people at American Express to help him get in touch with a customer that made a purchase with their Amex card. You see, he had mistakenly sold them a display case full of harmful chemicals and wanted to reach them before they ate or served it.

Now, there’s obviously no procedure for this, but American Express’ agent took charge of that situation, located him and called him before the cake was served.

Rackspace – An Example of Service-Oriented Culture

Rackspace is one of the largest web hosting companies on the internet and when one day, their entire phone system and internal servers crashed due to a major system failure, a good number of their employees took the never before seen step of tweeting out their personal phones numbers so panicking customers could reach out to them with any questions they had.

What makes this story even more beautiful is the fact that employees took these steps on their own. No one asked them to and it’s not in their employee handbook. This shows that Rackspace really truly has a culture of great service where customers’ needs are always paramount.

Trader Joe's breaks tradition, delivers groceries to snowed in Elderly Customer

This story’s about a snowed-in 89-year old Pennsylvanian man whose daughter, concerned that he didn’t have enough food, unsuccessfully calls multiple stores trying to get them to deliver. Finally, she called Trader Joe’s and even though they don’t normally deliver, they decided to make an exception that day.

Not only did they take the order, they also suggested a variety of items that may fit the elderly man’s special low-sodium diet! Both the groceries and delivery were free and the food was delivered within 30 minutes of the phone call.

Great customer service speaks for your brand in a way nothing else can. Your employees do not have to tweet private cell phone numbers or fly across the country for their services to be great, but you can empower them to provide experiences that stand out and linger in your customers’ minds long after the transaction is over. Adding a warm human touch to services is sometimes all it takes.



importance of customer service

Importance of Customer Service



memorable customer experience

How To Provide A Memorable Customer Experience