The Pareto, or 80/20, principle holds true for most businesses. In short, it says that 80 percent of your sales come from 20 percent of your customers. Naturally, these would be the customers you’d most like to attract and retain. 

Since the other 80 percent of customers will likely have at least some things in common with your top 20 percent, you won’t necessarily lose them when you focus energy and resources on the ideal customer group. Plus, you’ll sell more to high-value customers and satisfy their needs better. Your customer profile contains the information you need to do this effectively. 

The Types of Data Used to Create Customer Profiles

To begin customer profiling, identify one group of ideal customers. Later, you can drill down to finer details, creating several profiles that represent great customers. You need not use your imagination. The information you need is in your data, and you can fill any gaps by looking at external data and by conducting market research. The information you need includes:

• Demographics: Here, you’ll investigate factors like age, gender, income, family composition, and preferred sales channels. 
• Market insights: Using external data, you can uncover details showing what products and services your profiled customer enjoys. Although you may not be competing in these niches, market insights give you a more holistic view of where your product or service fits into customers’ lives. 
• Customer behaviour and buying journeys: Find out how customers interact with your business. How would they typically find out about your products? What do they do next? How do they prefer to communicate? What prompts them to engage? Along with the other information you’ve gathered, this data helps you to understand customer needs more clearly. 

B2B vs B2C Customer Profiles

In a sense, B2B and B2C customer profiles are very similar. Both types of businesses profile the ideal customer. However, the data you use when developing B2B customer profiles will look somewhat different. For example, instead of capturing demographics, you would classify business clients according to factors like business size and industry. However, every business’s buying decisions are made by people, so although their focus is different, human factors are still of interest. 

Benefits of Customer Profiling

Summing up the benefits of customer profiling, having a deep understanding of your ideal customers helps you to attract, serve, and sell to them. This has multiple ramifications. For example, you can:

• Develop new products they’ll love.
• Optimise communications for relevance and engagement.
• Gain more precise insights into market share and business performance.
• Optimise your marketing investment while targeting highly relevant, “ideal” market segments and enhancing returns.
• Upsell and cross-sell more effectively thanks to a better understanding of customer needs and motivations. 
• Foster greater customer loyalty, reduce attrition, and enhance lifetime value by promoting customer satisfaction. 

Examples of Customer Profiles

There are several approaches to customer profiling you can consider. You need not choose only one of them. Different approaches may be useful for different functions. For example, some profiling methods are great for sales teams, while others have more appeal to marketing professionals. Examples include:

Scorecards

Using key commonalities that signal an ideal customer, sales teams can use customer profiles to target outbound sales. Scorecard elements in B2B selling might include Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline (BANT). For each of these, you can specify an ideal fit, a potential fit, and a poor fit. Identify combinations of elements that would prompt outreach. 

Segmented Profiles

Your ideal customers could match more than one profile. In that case, a segmented profile that provides tips for salespeople and marketers on how best to communicate can prove useful. Beware of identifying too many segments – it can dilute your focus and become too complex to be useful. 

A Basic Customer Profile

Sometimes, simplicity pays off. A very basic customer profile can be hugely effective, provided you identify your ideal customers correctly. An example could begin with basic demographic information and answer key questions like:

• How do your best customers discover you, research your products, and what encourages them to choose you over competitors?
• Which products do they choose, why, and how often do they use them?
• What are their possible pain points when dealing with your company or using your products?
• What are their goals, and how does your product support them?

Buyer Personas

Although buyer personas are slightly different from customer profiles, using profiling data to construct them can make them very effective tools. Use your data to create a “person” or series of people who represent ideal customers and make them relatable. Understanding their goals, motivations, and challenges can bring a greater sense of warmth, humanity, and understanding to marketing messaging and sales strategies. 

Steps to Build Effective Customer Profiles

Develop a template detailing all the things you need to know so that you can better serve your ideal customers. Don’t assume you know who they are just yet. You will find this out as you use your profiling tools. These will include sales histories and information gathered in the customer service and sales process. 

Check metrics and analytics, for example, website analytics and social media analytics, to discover what engages ideal customers. Remember, not all engagement comes from your top customers. Choose quality over quantity. Throughout, refer to or adjust customer journey mapping to identify the routes ideal customers follow. 

The good news is that most businesses do not need to invest in new tools. They already have a wealth of data. All they need to do is make sense of it. However, don’t get so technology-focused that you don’t take opinions from customer-facing employees on board, even if not all of it is palatable or agrees with your preconceptions. 

Their opinions may point toward data you should examine more closely. For example, customer service employees can likely identify customer pain points easily. You can investigate their impact by looking at analytics, customer feedback reports, reviews, and CRM reports.

Your Customers Have The Answers: Are You Listening?

Nowadays, we often become so data-focused that we forget the importance of human contact. While you will find valuable data from self-service interactions, the in-person ones have far greater depth. In short, customer profiling is about customers, so it makes sense to listen to them. 

Using your records of interactions, you can find out what people are saying, how they feel, what they like, and what they struggle with. Who is the best fit for your products? Let real customers provide the answers.  

Whether you’d like to canvas customers for opinions directly or hope to gather information through sales and support calls, getting the intelligence you need can be easier and more cost-effective than you may have believed. 

Make it easy for them to get in touch, and let RSVP respond and gather data. It’s scalable, effective, and you can get a wealth of actionable data from our customer service analytics. Contact us today to find out more about our customer service outsourcing solutions. We do the listening, and you and your customers get the benefits. 

Read more about Customer Service

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Simply put, customer insights help us to get to know our customers better. They help us to understand customer needs, why and what they buy, and what they prefer when interacting with our businesses. 

How the Methods We Use to Gain Customer Insights Have Evolved

Although the term may be relatively new, entrepreneurs have always worked to understand what customers want. Whether they were selling or bartering, people always understood the value of knowing their customers. For centuries, this was done in person. Tradespeople offered goods or services and soon found out why people supported them through simple word of mouth and observed behaviour. 

As commerce developed, decision-makers became less likely to have direct contact with customers and had to rely on figures and those who dealt with customers for information. As communication tools improved and it became possible to canvass opinions from large samples of potential customers, market research emerged as the next big thing. 

Nowadays, we have analytics, big data, and even AI to help us uncover important information about our customers. However, among all these tech tools, human interaction remains as important as it ever has been. In fact, it’s where we will gain many of our most significant insights. 

Customer Experience Insights

There are multiple sources we can turn to for customer experience insights, and each of them is important. Simply knowing there is demand for a product or service isn’t enough. If we do not offer our customers positive experiences, they will look for alternatives. In a competitive world, it is very likely they will find other options. 

Search for customer experience insights in:

• Website and app analytics
• Customer reviews
• Customer service and support records
• Customer surveys
• Social media posts and mentions
• Communities and forums
• Market research results

You need not exercise your imagination to find ways to enhance the customer experience. Your customers will give you the answers themselves, either through what they say or what they do. If you haven’t considered customer insight analysis before, you are very likely to have the data already. It’s just a matter of putting it to work for you. 

Customer Data Insights

If you’re hoping to gain insights about your customers, what they think of your business and its products, and how you can better serve them, it’s time to dive into the data. Apart from looking at how they interact with your website or app, you can find information like:

• Demographics: Find out what type of people support your business and where they are from. You may think you know, but you might find some surprises.
• Purchasing patterns: Analyse what people buy, when they make a purchase, and determine whether they return to buy again. 
• Customer lifetime value: Your business wins customers, but customer lifetime value indicates what each win is likely to be worth and gives you a benchmark for improvement. 
• Channel preferences: Discover how and where customers like to get in touch. Though it is comparatively simple to please them all with omnichannel service, this information can help you to set priorities. 
• Sentiment analysis: How customers feel is just as important as what they do. Find out what earns you accolades and where there may be room for improvement. 
• Usage data: If you’re selling an online service, you can get customer insights by finding out how often they use it and which features they prefer. A customer success initiative may help boost their satisfaction. 

Apart from helping you boost customer satisfaction and, in turn, customer retention, you may also gain valuable customer segmentation insights. This helps you to target your marketing spend where it will be most fruitful. 

Other Types of Customer Insight Analysis

There are numerous things you should know about your customers and should track through customer insight analysis. To demonstrate just how helpful this might be, consider the following examples:

• Uncover customer needs and pain points
• Investigate buying behaviour
• Gain insights into customer journeys
• Measure customer satisfaction
• Get feedback about your products and services
• Determine what engages customers
• Investigate customer expectations and preferences
• Determine the signs of potential churn
• Find out how customers perceive your brand

As noted, much of the information you need to gain these insights is already available. Making sense of it is no longer a costly or time-consuming process. You may need a few digital tools and a little help, but it will be worth the investment. 

Provided you are ready to act on customer insights, the road to business growth will become clear. Ready to try something new? Test it out and use customer insights to determine whether you have accurately identified customer preferences. 

Need Customer Insights? Your Customer Service and Support Agents Are Uncovering a Goldmine

You can infer a lot from data-based customer insights, but the best information you can get comes from customers who are ready to talk. For example, you might send out a customer satisfaction survey and get responses. However, you won’t always know why customers rate you in a certain way. They may even be a trifle dishonest, magnifying minor problems or providing “polite” answers.

A customer who is on the line, talking to your agents, will tell you so much more. Specifically, customers are likely calling because of an obstacle to satisfaction. Perhaps they don’t know how to navigate your website, choose the right product for their needs, or use it once they have it. For each person who calls, there are likely hundreds of others who simply give up, walk away, and never come back. 

The message? Every interaction with a customer who is ready and willing to share their experiences is a goldmine of information. Your representatives are listening, and they should be equipped with software that helps them record the types of interactions they handle and their outcomes. 

Get Human Empathy and Intuition On The Line With RSVP

Now that we have stated a strong case for humans listening to humans as the best source of customer insights out there, you may be wondering if there’s a scalable way to implement the round-the-clock, in-person customer service your customers want. 

There is. Choose RSVP’s London-based team for outsourced customer service that also serves you. We have the advanced software that lets you gain customer insights at a glance, and the people who will treat your customers as well, or better, than you could treat them yourself. 

Customer satisfaction matters, and there are limits to what AI can achieve in this area. It still takes people to truly understand people, and our team is there for you. As the World Economic Forum says, “Human capital is your new competitive edge in the gen AI era.” You have the products; we have the people. Contact us today and let’s work together to get deep customer insights that will help shape your business. 

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We should distinguish between physical needs and psychological needs. When you buy staple foods, it is because you need them for your survival. Basic foodstuffs fulfil a physical need. However, many of the things we buy, from fashion items to luxury foods or entertainment, fulfil psychological needs.

When we use the term “customer needs” in sales and marketing, we generally do not refer to physical needs. Instead, we are talking about the things customers want from the businesses they support. 

These go beyond mere survival and enter the realm of preference. When their needs are unsupported, customers will not suffer undue physical harm, but they will stop supporting your business as soon as they find an option that better serves their needs. 

Towards a Customer Needs Definition in Sales and Marketing

In sales and marketing, we can define customer needs as factors that motivate a purchasing decision. They can be categorised as pricing requirements, quality requirements, choice, and the need for convenience. 

The specific elements that go into each of these differ according to the product and how customers perceive it. For example, low pricing encourages budget-conscious shoppers but may deter customers who hope to gain status by owning the latest luxury goods. 

The Importance of Identifying Customer Needs

Understanding your customers and their needs enables you to develop more effective business strategies, allocate resources more efficiently, drive sales growth, and maintain a stronger competitive position. It is important to identify customer needs so that you:

• Target your market with appropriate messaging, including overall brand voice, marketing copy, content marketing strategy, and social media campaigns.
• Gain insights for product acquisition or product development. When you know what your customers need, you can enhance your products and product range with greater confidence.
• Allocate resources efficiently by investing in aspects that matter to your customers and limiting the potential for waste on unnecessary or unimportant elements. 
• Position your brand as a solution to customer problems, offering stronger value propositions and differentiating your business from your competitors. 

From a sales perspective, understanding customer needs allows you to take advantage of opportunities you might otherwise miss. Examples of these include:

• Offering the best-fit products to each of your customers based on their goals. For example, a customer purchasing photo editing software as a hobbyist may need fewer features and lower pricing than an advertising executive who wants to use the product professionally. 
• Build stronger customer relationships. Customers want to feel that you identify with them and understand them. When you do, they experience a feeling of connection. “They really know what I needed,” is the comment you want to hear.
• Achieving higher conversion rates is simple when you understand what your customers need and offer them just that.
• Upselling and cross-selling opportunities also flow from knowing what customers need. In upselling, you offer a higher-value product that is a better fit for a customer. In cross-selling, you offer them extras that go with their purchase.  

With so many benefits in store for those who take the time to know their customers and their needs, taking a closer look at what these may be is a worthwhile investment of your time. Never just assume you know what all your customers want. Your analysis may provide surprising insights. 

Customer Needs Example

To illustrate customer needs and how they affect your business strategies, let’s consider a hypothetical example. Both customers want the same type of product, but for different reasons, at different price points, and with varying quality and convenience expectations. 

Product: Jewellery

Customer 1: Anna is an 18-year-old student who enjoys following the latest trends. She doesn’t have a lot of spare cash and wants it to go as far as possible. She wants to look pretty when out with her friends.

Anna’s needs:  

Quality: Anna is interested in trends over quality

Price: Low, depreciating value

Convenience: Quick gratification, instant purchase, impulse buys

Choice: A range of different colours and designs to choose from, no need for customisation

Customer 2: Mary is a 40-year-old professional. She loves unique items, fine gemstones, and bespoke design. She is not particularly price sensitive. She wants to enhance her image as a lover of the finer things in life.

Mary’s needs:

Quality: Mary is searching for premium quality

Price: High, reflecting desire for quality, rarity, and increasing value over time

Convenience: Expects service, willing to wait for customised options

Choice: A range of design options and customisations

Although both these customers are in the market for jewellery, the type of company and product that Anna would support is very different from what will appeal to Mary. They also have very different reasons for considering a purchase. While convenience is very important to Anna, Mary is willing to search for very special items. 

It is likely that a single business would not be able to serve the needs of both Anna and Mary. For instance, seeing premium items at high prices would deter Anna, and seeing mass-produced items at low prices would deter Mary.

Predicting Customer Needs

Using our example above, we can easily predict Anna’s needs. Wherever fashion goes, she will be eager to follow. If she asks for help when making a purchasing decision, her needs will be simple. For example, she would like to know if there is a bracelet to match a pendant.

Mary’s needs will be less subject to change, but are more complex. She may want extras, such as adaptations to existing designs, unique design suggestions, and a selection of gemstones to choose from. She will require access to complete information and technical expertise. 

Customer Needs Analysis

Before you embark on your analysis, consider what your objectives are. For example, you may want to know whether your product fits the markets you would most like to serve, be searching for unmet needs you can capitalise on, or hope to identify the reasons why people choose specific products. 

Divide Your Customers Into Market Segments

Analyse your customer base and identify market segments based on questions like demographics (including income), lifestyle, behaviour, and, for B2B companies, industry type and business size. 

Gather Customer Feedback

Some of the feedback you are searching for may already be in your databases. For example, your customer relationship management (CRM) records can show what customers commonly struggle with and the questions or requests that caused them to reach out for help. Past customer satisfaction metrics and online reviews can also prove enlightening. 

Never forget to analyse how customers behave when visiting your website. This is a form of feedback that can give you strong insights into what customers want, when they find it, and when they abandon hope and move on. 

If you need more information and have the budget for it, you can conduct further market research. However, do remember that you are likely to have large volumes of useful data that you may not yet have analysed in this context. 

Analyse Your Data

Look for problems, pain points, and indications of emotional drivers that influenced decision-making. Refer back to your market segments, and when possible, link data to the relevant demographic. When you aren’t sure of root causes, try out the five “why” questions that help with root cause analysis. Cross-reference information with your customer journey map to identify where you succeeded or failed to address customer needs. 

Strategise and Action 

Begin by categorising the needs you identified into stated needs, inferred needs, and those rare but beautiful moments when customers were enthusiastic enough to comment on how pleased they were. Next, identify product, marketing, and sales priorities, determining a customer needs-based strategy for each. 

Test and Improve

As always, your work is not done until you determine whether you have successfully pinpointed customer needs and found ways to address them more effectively. Benchmarking can be effective, or you can try A/B testing or a pilot program. Throughout, keep analysing customer feedback. 

Let Us Help You To Gauge, Meet, and Exceed Customer Needs and Expectations

RSVP offers you a range of services that may help you to identify customer needs and expectations more accurately. For example, our customer service and support personnel will use advanced software to keep you in the picture regarding the needs your customers express.  We can even undertake market research on your behalf or help you with back office services that address your customers’ needs for efficiency. 

However, if you are searching for market intelligence, our customer service outsourcing offering provides a scalable and professional option that serves two purposes: working to keep your customers feeling that their needs are addressed, and gathering information on what their primary needs are. 

Find out why we are a market-leading customer service and BPO company today. Contact us and discover how we can help you get to know your customers’ needs better while you focus on strategising for customer satisfaction, market fit, and sales success.

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We have good news for you. Your business doesn’t have to be that way, and instead of losing money on an “expense,” customer service could be your pathway to success. We’ve collected inspiring customer service-related quotes that explain just why superb human service is the one thing that could put you miles ahead of your competitors. 

Customer Service is Your Competitive Edge

Customer satisfaction is at an all-time low, and poor service is among customers’ top gripes. Good service, it seems, has become rare enough to make news headlines. Just treating your customers well and going the extra mile when called for could be your top competitive advantage. These quotes about customer service from knowledge leaders reflect this. 

“Goodwill is the only asset that competition cannot undersell or destroy.” (Marshall Field)

“He profits most who serves best.” (Arthur F. Sheldon)

“You’ll never have a product or price advantage again. They can be easily duplicated, but a strong customer service culture can’t be copied.” (Jerry Fritz)

“Customer service will allow you to compete within your respective industry, but truly great customer service will allow you to transcend the industry altogether.” (Than Merrill)

“Customer service is what sets the good companies apart from the bad companies. Think of it as an added value. In today’s competitive industry, everyone can provide the best product, but not great customer service.” (Charles Vallena)

Customer Service is a Strategic Investment, Not a Cost

We’ve always believed this, and it seems plenty of authorities agree. The money you put into customer service may be the best investment in your business you’ve ever made. Let’s hear it through these “I wish I’d said that myself” quotes regarding customer service.

“There are many who subscribe to the convention that service is a business cost, but our data demonstrates that superior service is an investment that can help drive business growth.” (Jim Bush)

“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.” (Michael LeBoeuf)

“If you make a sale, you make a living. If you make an investment of time and good service in a customer, you can make a fortune.” (Jim Rohn)

“Customer service is not a cost centre; it’s a revenue generator.” (Micah Solomon)

“What helps people, helps business.” (Leo Burnett)

Customer Retention Through Service Boosts Your Bottom Line

It costs a lot to win a new customer, so it pays to keep them once you have them. The best way to do that is to serve them well and build relationships. According to a Bain & Company study, increasing customer retention by 5 percent can increase profits by as much as 25 percent. These business thinkers say it all.

“When the customer comes first, the customer will last.” (Robert Half)

 “Sales without Customer Service is like stuffing money into a pocket full of holes.” (David Tooman)

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” (Sam Walton)  

“Listen to your customers or you will have none”―Zach Hendrix 

Great Customer Service Turns Customers Into Your Best Salespeople

We all know how important referrals are, and many businesses report that their best business comes in this way. Treat those referred customers well, and you can get a snowball effect at no additional cost. We’re not talking about “referral marketing” here, but about honest-to-goodness and completely sincere recommendations. These quotes about customer service hit the nail on the head. 

“Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.” (James Cash Penney) 

“The key is when a customer walks away, thinking, ‘Wow, I love doing business with them, and I want to tell others about the experience.” (Shep Hyken)

“Happy customers are your biggest advocates and can become your most successful sales team.” (Lisa Masiello)

“Referrals are the fingerprints of the great experiences you provide.” (Max Traylor)

“You can focus on adoption, retention, expansion, or advocacy, or you can focus on your customers and get all of those things.” (Lincoln Murphy)

Customer Service Means Listening, And Listening Gives You Strategic Guidance

At RSVP, we provide important business intelligence to our call centre clients simply by listening to their customers. Those who choose to use this intelligence to guide their strategies find new ways to satisfy and even delight their clients. These great customer service quotes underscore just how important listening is.

“The customer tells us how to stay in business, [so it’s] best that we listen.” (Pamela Nelson) 

“Customers often know more about your products than you do. Use them as a source of inspiration and ideas for product development.” (David J. Greer)

The more you engage with customers, the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.” (John Russell)

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” (Bill Gates)

“Customers are important; they are the experts on what your product is, when we often get caught up in what our product could or would be” (Cairo Amani)

Customer Service Matters Because Customers Are The Reason Your Business Exists

Customer service is so much more than just making people feel good. It’s key to business survival and business success. We’ll add to our selection of the very best customer service quotes by closing with reminders about who really is the boss: every one of your customers.

“Customer service shouldn’t just be a department, it should be the entire company.” (Tony Hsieh)

“Bottom-line obsession comes from turning the pursuit of money into a God and forgetting the real master your business serves: The Customer.”  (Michael Shevack)

“Every company’s greatest assets are its customers, because without customers, there is no company.” (Michael LeBoeuf)

Customer Service is Human

You can help customers with easy enquiries using automation. If it’s easy for them to find what they want and get what they want, they’ll be mildly pleased. However, only humans can delight, soothe, empathise, or solve that knotty problem your automated systems weren’t quite prepared for. And only humans can make real connections. We’ll close with a pair of recent quotes we believe capture this to perfection.

Stellar service should be non-negotiable, and merchants shouldn’t hide behind self-service tools and technology when it comes to knowing their products and taking care of their customers.” (Lauren Freedman) 

The greatest technology in the world has not replaced the ultimate relationship-building tool between a customer and a business―the human touch.” (Shep Hyken)

How RSVP Helps You Solve The Challenge of Providing Exceptional Customer Service

As you can see from our collection of great customer service quotes, we’re almost religious about customer service, and so we should be. We make it our business to serve customers as if we were the businesses they support. 

We understand that having a scalable number of people available to pick up the phone at a moment’s notice around the clock isn’t possible for most businesses, even big ones. Quality and training matter too. Those callers need to meet with more than enthusiastically helpful voices on the phone. They need people who are willing to empathise, advise, or fill whatever role the caller wants them to play. 

Finally, the people who represent your business must have the technology they need to capture information and relay it in a digestible format so that you can analyse the messages customers are sending out. Where do they struggle? Why do they need help? What are they happy or unhappy about? 

At RSVP, we do all of these things and more. We’re proud of our team, and it may interest you to know that all of them are actors. Who else can sound chipper at 2 AM or project your brand persona as if it were a real, live character?

We don’t just talk the talk. From sales to outsourced customer service and support, we work to produce measurable results. Call our London offices to discuss your customer service needs today.  We’re eager to serve you and your customers.

Read more about Customer Service

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Because it is composed of several elements, you can even produce scores that place greater emphasis on an element that’s crucial to overall customer satisfaction. Overall, your customer satisfaction index not only indicates how happy your customers are, but also shows you what makes them happy. 

Read our guide to customer service.

Why Knowing Your Customer Satisfaction Index Means a Lot to Your Business

While it’s common knowledge that happy customers are a good thing, it’s still worth reminding yourself of the reasons why they’re such an important asset to your business. So, before we dive into calculating CSI, let’s do just that. Satisfied customers are important because:

• There’s a far better chance they’ll support your business again. This raises customer lifetime value. In other words, each customer you win brings in more revenue over the medium to long term. 
• They’re more likely to recommend you to people they know. Happy customers are ready to share the love. When someone they know expresses a need similar to the one that led them to you, they’ll be quick to help out with a recommendation. 
• You improve your competitive advantage, without reducing prices. People are willing to pay more for products that leave them feeling good. In addition, a lot of businesses are failing in the customer satisfaction stakes. Get this win, and you can beat them easily. 

The bottom line is this: If you don’t have satisfied customers but have a great product, you will lose out to businesses with a similar, better, or even a lower-quality product if they leave customers feeling more satisfied about their experiences than you do. 

How to Calculate Your Customer Satisfaction Index

Let’s kick off with a very simplified example. Through market research, a SaaS company has determined that the most important contributors to customer satisfaction are:

• Pricing
• User friendliness
• Unique technical features
• Good customer support services

They can find out how customers feel about each of these elements and express it as a percentage. For example, 80 percent of customers are happy with pricing, 60 percent think the product is user-friendly, 70 percent like the features, and 90 percent feel positive about customer support. 

The average percentage could represent a customer satisfaction index. However, it will only do so effectively if each element is equally important to their customers. To make the customer satisfaction index measurement meaningful, you need to know which of the measurements matter most to customers and weight the score toward that feature. 

Developing a Weighted Customer Satisfaction Index

Mathematically, it’s easy to give one element greater weight than others. Let’s say price is the most important feature for customers, and it is 20 percent more important than other elements you’ve included in your customer satisfaction index. 

Instead of calculating a straightforward average between all scores, you can give pricing more weight than the other elements when calculating overall customer satisfaction. Because of weighting, the overall score will more accurately reflect the extent to which customer satisfaction is impacted. 

Tips for Implementing a Customer Satisfaction Index as a Key Metric

Metrics are worthless unless you choose the right things to measure, align them with your strategic goals, and aim for continuous improvement. So, our first tip is to embrace this metric as an important indicator and get your team on board. Next, it’s time for some brainstorming and research.

Learn What Matters to Customers

You may know why customers buy your product and like your business, but you may be less certain about what they see as the most important keys to satisfaction. Your best customers fit the profile you would like all your customers to have, so ask them to help you out by ranking attributes you’ve identified and asking if they have any additional comments. To get a good response rate, consider offering them a little incentive. 

Apply Measurements Consistently And Look For Omissions

It may be worth analysing customer satisfaction and asking for input at different stages of the customer journey. In addition, whenever something you do changes, find out how it affects customer satisfaction. Remember that some things change without you having done anything. 

For example, a SaaS product that was best-in-class six months ago may no longer occupy the top spot in customer perceptions now. Applied an update? Find out whether customers are satisfied with your efforts. As time goes on, you can refine the elements you implement in your customer satisfaction index to get increasingly accurate measurements and gain a deeper understanding of how you can work to keep your customers happy.

Compare Your CSI Score to Sales Performance and Churn

If you’re scoring sky-high on your CSI but are still losing customers, you may need to revise your opinions on what you are measuring. Monitoring how customers move through your sales funnel and noting areas where you lose prospects may indicate an important customer satisfaction element you are not yet considering. Losing converted customers may not be a sign of dissatisfaction, but it is worth finding out if it is. 

Listen to Your Customers

Having a customer satisfaction metric that offers a fair idea of how happy or unhappy your customers are and gives you clues as to why is all very well. Still, good old-fashioned listening can tell you much more.  

In today’s world, where remote transactions and automated communications are the norm, it’s easy to lose touch with the real people who support your business. Your customer satisfaction index can give you an overview of how they feel, but the most valuable intelligence still comes from in-person interaction. 

Having dedicated customer service agents equipped with software that allows you to identify common customer issues helps you learn what matters to customers. For every person who takes the time to talk to your representatives, there may be ten or more who simply give up and walk away dissatisfied.  

RSVP: Because it Takes People To Understand People

Metrics like the customer satisfaction index are great ways to benchmark your positioning and measure progress toward new heights, but there are people behind the numbers. It takes people to understand people and build connections. 

With RSVP, you can understand your customers like never before. It is fully scalable, equipped with the latest tech, and, most importantly, staffed by caring people who will represent your brand as well or better than you could yourself. 

Learn about your customers and what matters to them. Act on the information, and see your customer satisfaction index soar. Customer service outsourcing could be the best thing you ever did for your business. Contact us today and let’s work together to boost customer satisfaction, loyalty, and, of course, your sales.

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The post Customer Satisfaction Index: What It Is and How to Calculate It appeared first on RSVP Call Centre.

In today’s fast-paced and interconnected world, the bedrock of any successful business lies in its ability to provide exceptional customer service. Whether in a bustling retail environment or an online marketplace, the landscape of customer interactions continues to evolve, presenting both challenges and opportunities for businesses aiming to thrive.

This comprehensive guide navigates the intricate realm of customer service. We delve into the principles, strategies, and innovative practices that drive exceptional customer service experiences. This article aims to equip businesses with the insights and tools necessary to not just meet but exceed customer expectations.

Table of Contents

• Types of Customer Service
• Types of Customers
• What Exactly is Good Customer Service?
• Why Customer Service is So Important for Your Business
• Customer Needs
• Customer Profiles
• Creating a Customer Service Strategy
• Customer Service Management
• How to Improve Customer Service
• Customer Service Skills
• Active Listening Skills for Customer Service
• Empathy in Customer Service
• Collecting Customer Feedback
• How to Deal With Angry Customers
• How to Handle Customer Complaints
• Customer Communication
• Customer Centricity
• Increasing Sales Through Customer Service
• How to Build Better Customer Relationships
• Customer Insights
• Customer Satisfaction
• Customer Satisfaction Index
• Customer Engagement
• Call Handling Skills for Excellent Customer Service
• Customer Service Outsourcing

Types of Customer Service

Customer service is one of the most important differentiating factors that customers look at when choosing between competing companies. No matter how great your products are, customers want to know that you’re ready to help them when they have questions, problems, or just need advice. However there are many types of customer service, and individual consumers will have their own sets of preferences. 

With phone or call centre customer service, customers get in-person service without having to trek to a store location. For businesses, there are multiple advantages, including better relationship-building. And there are other advantages. Calls can be recorded, for example, helping businesses to exercise better quality control and verify what happened during interactions. Plus you can outsource, allowing you to offer 24/7 customer service, and scale service in response to demand. 

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Types of Customers

As people, every single individual is unique. But as customers, some people share specific histories and sets of intentions. Knowing who is who helps you to give them what they expect or, better yet, offer them something they didn’t expect but definitely want. Even if you do business online, you’ll get your share of window shoppers. They’re interested enough to take a look at what you do, but they don’t really have any intention to buy and prefer to be unobtrusive. So, what can you do to turn “just looking” into sales?

Just as high-street boutiques work to make their displays enticing, so should you. For online businesses, this means making your storefront an attention-grabber. And, since window shoppers prefer not to interact just yet, make sure that they have all the information they need to evaluate products that catch their eye. List product features unambiguously. Explain their benefits clearly. And, whatever else you do, don’t leave window shoppers in the dark about pricing.

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What Exactly is Good Customer Service?

It is important to offer your customers a pleasant experience when they’re dealing with your business. Fail to do so, and you’ll not only lose a customer, but gain a detractor. Serve them even better than they expected, and you’ve gained a lifelong supporter. Reputations are built on customer service, and you’d like to make sure yours is among the best.

So, when you get right down to it, what is excellent customer service? Good customer service means being ready to help your customers so that their needs are met, and they are left feeling good about their experience with your businesses. Customer service begins with the people who provide it, and it’s a skilled job. So, the first thing you need to provide your customers with good service is skilled people. You’re looking for people who genuinely like dealing with people, listening to them, and helping them. Personalised attention is another important feature of good customer service. It can’t be faked, and it’s rarer than you might expect. 

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Why Customer Service is So Important for Your Business

Many business owners make the mistake of thinking that good customer service is an extra that’s mainly of benefit to the customers themselves. However, it’s extremely important for your business too, and it translates to money in the bank. Excellent customer service often leads to lower acquisition costs as many buyers purchase more than once based on their customer service experience. It can also lead to more referrals as well as positive customer reviews that might just be the deciding factor that converts a new customer. A business that has built a good customer service reputation is also more likely to acquire the best talent when recruiting.

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Customer Needs

What customers need depends, to a large extent, on the products they are purchasing. For example, what you need from a breakfast food differs from what you need from a healthcare practitioner. At the same time, customers have preferences that they look for when purchasing a product or using a service. We should distinguish between physical needs and psychological needs. When you buy staple foods, it is because you need them for your survival. Basic foodstuffs fulfil a physical need. However, many of the things we buy, from fashion items to luxury foods or entertainment, fulfil psychological needs.

When we use the term “customer needs” in sales and marketing, we generally do not refer to physical needs. Instead, we are talking about the things customers want from the businesses they support. These go beyond mere survival and enter the realm of preference. When their needs are unsupported, customers will not suffer undue physical harm, but they will stop supporting your business as soon as they find an option that better serves their needs.

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Customer Profiles

From the name, you might think that a customer profile records the traits of a single person who buys from you. While you might apply the term in that way, it can be much more than that. In this context, a customer profile represents everything you can discover about your ideal customer. The Pareto, or 80/20, principle holds true for most businesses. In short, it says that 80 percent of your sales come from 20 percent of your customers. Naturally, these would be the customers you’d most like to attract and retain.

Since the other 80 percent of customers will likely have at least some things in common with your top 20 percent, you won’t necessarily lose them when you focus energy and resources on the ideal customer group. Plus, you’ll sell more to high-value customers and satisfy their needs better. Your customer profile contains the information you need to do this effectively.

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Creating a Customer Service Strategy

If you’re wondering how to improve customer retention, win accolades in online reviews and forums, or gain enthusiastic customer referrals, it’s time to work on your customer service strategy. Customer service is a vitally important component of your business’s overall reputation. It not only impacts how customers feel about your business, but also how your employees see the company they work for. It’s not just about feelings, however. Customer service directly impacts your business’s bottom line. When you deliver great customer service, you’ll find it easier to keep the customers you already have. They’ll also be eager to refer friends and associates, attracting new customers. 

Facing tough competition in your market? Customer service could be the differentiating factor that sets your business apart from the pack. Tired of a race to the bottom when it comes to pricing? People are prepared to pay more when they can be confident about your service. Additional advantages include staff members who are motivated because they are part of an organisation that delivers value to its customers. You may experience lower staff turnover, and a better capacity to attract top talent. In addition, being customer focused means that your business will be committed to quality and efficiency. Once again, this impacts profitability and competitiveness. Gearing up to serve customers efficiently also means improving efficiencies throughout your business. All in all, a customer service strategy has more far-reaching impacts than many people realise. Great results come from great strategies. 

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Customer Service Management

Customer service management focuses on customer needs, coordinating customer service-related activities across internal departments. It deploys people and technology to serve customers, and strives for continuous service improvement. There are overlaps between customer service management and customer relationship management. However, the focus is different. Customer service management focuses on processes that resolve customer queries and issues. Customer relationship management is much broader and includes matching sales and marketing activities to customer profiles. Thus, CSM has more immediacy while CRM is longer-term. Needless to say, it’s impossible to build good customer relationships without strong customer service.

Effective customer service management ensures that customers receive priority attention. Many customers are happy to begin by interacting with resource bases and automated customer service features. However, if they want to talk to a human, they should be able to do so at any time they please. When they do decide to interact with representatives, they will expect open channels, rapid responses, and empowered, knowledgeable assistance. The challenge in customer service management is to achieve a blend between technology and human resources that match or exceed customer expectations. Customer convenience and satisfaction takes precedence at all times, and without this mindset, businesses will fail to provide satisfactory service.

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How to Improve Customer Service

Great customer service is one of the top ways to win hearts and minds. If your service is head-and-shoulders above that of your competitors, you’ll even find that you get real customer loyalty, with customers returning for more of what you offer and referring their friends. Finding out how to improve customer service, and implementing that knowledge, could be one of the most important strategic initiatives you’ve ever undertaken. 

Customer service isn’t just about understanding people and making them feel valued. It also requires intimate knowledge of the technical side of your business. Provide regular training and refresher courses to ensure that your staff knows how to help clients with practical problems. Get feedback from line managers and staff, and show them that you think their work is important by holding customer service review sessions. Build a customer-focused team culture that recognises the customers as their reason for being.

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Customer Service Skills

What are the key skills needed for customer service? While some of them may be obvious, others are a little less so – and not all of them can be imparted through training. Great customer service agents need much more than a formula for dealing with customers in order to represent your business effectively. It’s easy enough to teach customer service workers to avoid using certain words and phrases and to use others instead. But it’s a simple matter for your customers to see the difference between a facade and a genuinely positive attitude. Ideally, positivity should come naturally, and if it’s there, positive language use becomes second nature. While positivity is one of the most important skills in customer service, it’s not something you can extract from someone who doesn’t love helping people and who doesn’t feel proud to represent your company.

Communication is an essential customer service skill. But communication is so much more than just a way to deliver messages. It begins when the customer has an idea, which they then encode into language and deliver. As a good communicator, your customer service worker knows how to decode that message, including any unspoken nuances. Communication skills can be learned, but some people master it more easily than others. Of all the skills in customer service, product knowledge is the easiest to learn. As an employer, you should ensure that onboarding and training involve a process in which your hires acquire extensive product knowledge as a basic skill required for customer service. 

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Active Listening Skills for Customer Service

Active listening is an excellent skill that will help you in interpersonal relationships of every kind. When it comes to your customer service, it’s an absolute must. Mastering active listening techniques will make you a better communicator. You’ll understand people better and be quicker to help them get the answers they’re looking for. If there’s any form of tension, listening actively will help to defuse the situation. When you’re making an effort to fully understand your clients and are demonstrating interest in their welfare through active listening, you will come across as being likeable, understanding, and efficient. 

There are various active listening exercises that you can do alone or with a group of other people. For example, a group of people can each answer the same question from their perspective. As a member of the group, the challenge is to focus on what’s being said rather than on what your answer to the question will be. However, building good habits takes practice, and you probably won’t be on an active listening course or in group activities every single day. Evaluate your progress with active listening by giving yourself a little assessment after each interaction with customers.

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Empathy in Customer Service

Looking to use AI in customer service? There’s one vital ingredient it lacks, and that’s empathy: the ability to understand emotions and respond appropriately. This can lead to already-frustrated or angry customers becoming even angrier and more frustrated. If you’ve ever tried talking to a bot and ended up insulting it in every way you deem possible, you’ll know what we’re talking about.

Of course, chatbots and AI have their place, but if you want to gain a reputation for taking good care of your customers, it should always be easy for them to talk to another human being. When they do, the person representing your company should exercise empathy. Apart from dealing with the issue at hand, customers want your representatives to understand how they feel and respond appropriately.

This is more difficult than it sounds. For example, there are nuances like understanding the difference between empathy and sympathy in customer service. The former means understanding their feelings while the latter means showing pity or sorrow and can all-too-easily come across as patronising.

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Collecting Customer Feedback

Looking to boost your sales and build an even better business reputation than you already have? There’s no need to stretch your imagination when you have customer feedback and ideas to work with. We love to talk about exceeding customer expectations, but most customers would be perfectly happy if you simply met them. All too often, businesses think they know what customers want, but fail to make use of customer feedback as a valuable source of intelligence. If you’re sending out customer satisfaction surveys, you might think you’re getting a clear picture of the average customer’s experience with your business, but are you really?

For example, a customer might say they would recommend your business to friends and family, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you know why they reached that conclusion. It could simply be a matter of your product being the best solution currently available. If your competitors can match this, the response might change. All the same, even simple surveys, though somewhat flawed in their scope and detail, do provide some level of customer feedback.

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How to Deal With Angry Customers

No matter how good your business is and how hard you try to keep them all happy, there will be times when your customers get angry. Angry customers can be terribly intimidating. Your fight or flight response kicks in. Neither of these adrenaline-fuelled responses is going to help the situation. Begin by recognising that the customer isn’t targeting you as a person. Whether or not their anger is justified, they represent an opportunity rather than a threat. But to realise the opportunity for improvement that they represent, you first need to know how to deal with angry customers. 

Angry customers are very likely to make their feelings felt in the most public way possible: that damaging review on Google; what they say to their friends, family, and colleagues; those scathing social media posts – it can become a PR nightmare. So, your first concern may be damage control. Calm the customer. Make them less likely to share their fury for decades to come. But if that’s where it ends, you still missed the real opportunity. The important thing to remember is that most people don’t get angry for no reason at all. So, if your customer is angry, your business must have done something wrong. Finding out what that might be allows you to solve the issue and improve your business. 

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How to Handle Customer Complaints

It’s something you definitely didn’t want: there are customers who are somewhat unhappy about doing business with you. And that might be putting it mildly! To be fair, no business will please everyone all of the time. Most of your customers are happy campers. The ones who complain are probably the exceptions. All the same, you ignore them at your peril. Here’s the sunny side behind that looming customer complaint: every criticism represents an opportunity. Many customers don’t like to air complaints. The ones who speak up are offering you feedback that you’d be willing to pay for, and they’re doing it for free.

Every customer that complains is a Very Important Person. It might be a very angry VIP, but it’s someone who may be able to show you how to improve your business processes. As such, one complaint is worth a thousand affirmations. But, before you can reflect on lessons learned, you need to find out precisely what’s upsetting customers and how you can make things right. It can be a delicate process, but it’s worth doing it well.

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Customer Communication

The benefits of good communication with customers are easy to see. Nevertheless, let’s run through the big ones. Done well, your communications strategy gains new customers, helps you retain existing customers, improves perceptions of your brand, reinforces the image you want your brand to convey, and deepens customer engagement and loyalty. Customers are free to say what they like, but everything your business communicates to its customers must be aligned with your policy, strategy, and brand. That means having an in-depth understanding of all communications – from web pages and ads to billing communications and customer support interactions. 

Your communications methodology requires specific skill-sets depending on where it’s applied. For example, some people have great writing skills, while others have the verbal dexterity to handle communications on the fly. Some folks are experts at visual messaging, but may not do as well when asked to write or speak. The right communication skills in customer service depend on where they’re to be deployed. In implementing your customer communications strategy, knowing your people is just as important as knowing your customers. 

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Customer Centricity

Customer centricity means placing your customers at the core of your business. While this might sound sensible, few businesses really do it. In practice, they often see their special expertise as being “core” with customers at the periphery and customer service as a “support function” rather than a core process. The idea behind customer-centricity is that your business focuses on customer satisfaction, building customer loyalty, and creating strong relationships between your business and its customers.

The first basic principle of a customer-centric strategy is that customers are core. They’re part of your business rather than outliers. You express this through a focus on understanding your customers, anticipating their needs, and making interactions with your business both easy and pleasant. In short, you design your business around your customers and you cater to their perspectives on what your business ought to be. So, instead of trying to shape your customers to fit your business, you shape your business to fit your customers. Simple as that may sound, it’s rarer than you might have expected. 

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Increasing Sales Through Customer Service

Sales through service means providing customer service that results in bigger sales, but it’s not just a trick to make customers dig deeper. Instead, it’s a process that helps your clients experience greater satisfaction. Getting those extra sales through customer service requires a sensitive approach. Without it, you’re at risk of earning an awkward reputation as being “pushy.” To avoid this, your customer service agents should have a clear understanding of situations in which there are opportunities for upselling or offering extras. Motivate them to act on this by showing them that in doing so, they’re actually providing better service rather than simply pushing for bigger sales. 

Of course, a well-trained and skilful team is needed to implement sales through service techniques effectively. They shouldn’t just be good at delivering a sales pitch. They need to listen carefully to their customers and have the ability to match products to individual needs. Understanding these means paying attention to feelings as well as facts – customers don’t always know the terms they should use to describe their requirements.

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How to Build Better Customer Relationships

Building customer relationships can be easy when you’re serving a relatively small customer base. You may know your clients by name, and remember their preferences instantly. But as your business grows and you start serving a larger pool of clients, things become more complicated.

A great customer experience might leave your customer feeling good, but it isn’t a relationship yet. By ensuring that your customers enjoyed early interactions with your business, you’ve built a foundation of trust, but you have to keep up the good work. 

That includes things like showing you care, following up to check whether they’re satisfied, listening to their feedback and acting on it, and giving them service that’s even better than anything they expected. Reward their trust with consistency, and you have a relationship that might stand the test of time – as long as you keep doing your bit.

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Customer Insights

Customer insights are truths one can discover about customers by observing how they behave, analysing data, and listening to what they say. Businesses can use these customer insights to guide their strategies, including new product development, marketing approaches, and to identify ways to enhance the customer experience. Simply put, customer insights help us to get to know our customers better. They help us to understand customer needs, why and what they buy, and what they prefer when interacting with our businesses.

There are multiple sources we can turn to for customer experience insights, and each of them is important. Simply knowing there is demand for a product or service isn’t enough. If we do not offer our customers positive experiences, they will look for alternatives. In a competitive world, it is very likely they will find other options.

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Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction, sometimes abbreviated as CSAT, is a far deeper concept than it may seem on the surface. The definition is simple enough. Customer satisfaction relates to how satisfied your customers are with the goods or services you offer, the way they experienced customer service and the general efficiency of your company. The importance of customer satisfaction can’t be overstated. It’s the basis of your company’s reputation within its market, and it will have a direct impact on how profitable your business is. Gaining new customers requires financial investment, and having used your resources to get them, you’d like to keep them.

There’s a good chance that satisfied customers will give you repeat purchases, raising the lifetime value of each customer acquired. And, if they think you’re worth supporting, they’ll mention you to friends and associates who have similar needs. A recommendation from someone they know carries weight since it’s motivated by a spirit of helpfulness rather than the promise of profit. A person who makes a recommendation has experienced the business from a customer’s perspective – and that makes it seem more trustworthy than anything you might say about your business yourself.

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Customer Satisfaction

The Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) is a far more specific way of measuring customer satisfaction than the similar-sounding CSAT score. As you’ve probably guessed, CSI measures how satisfied your customers are, but the most important thing about it is that it’s built on metrics of the key things about your business that matter to your customers.

Because it is composed of several elements, you can even produce scores that place greater emphasis on an element that’s crucial to overall customer satisfaction. Overall, your customer satisfaction index not only indicates how happy your customers are, but also shows you what makes them happy.

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Customer Engagement

It would be easy to believe that customer engagement is an indicator of how interested customers are in your business, but that would be only half of the answer. The truth is that customer engagement is a relationship, and as such, it’s a two-way street. In short, your customers won’t be interested in you if you aren’t interested in them and their needs.

That’s why most definitions of customer engagement speak about the activities you undertake to create engagement. It’s a relationship that’s built on customer experiences, and develops beyond initial purchases. Not sure where to begin? Understanding what customers want is a good start. Customer engagement strategies help you to develop business relationships that feel very personal, regardless of how many customers you serve. You probably have an instinct for relationship-building already, but looking at what customers prefer can help to guide your strategies. Keep these principles in mind as you work to transform your business from a means to an end to an “old friend” whom your customers trust.

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Call Handling Skills for Excellent Customer Service

Call handling skills are essential for good customer service, but they don’t always enjoy the recognition they deserve. Effective call handling requires more than just technical knowledge. It requires superb communication skills and the ability to make each caller feel like a VIP. When you’re answering the phone all day long, it can be hard to sound energetic and ready to help, but that’s just what you need to do. The first impression your customer has is of your tone of voice and initial greeting.

Effective call handling requires a range of skills that are not always valued as they should be. And although sincerity goes a long way, there’ll be times when you will even need to be something of an actor. After all, you may have to deal with recurrent, routine queries, and the last thing you should do is sound as bored as you might feel. You may also find yourself in the uncomfortable position of having to deal with irate clients, not all of whom will express themselves with due moderation. Even if you’re furious, you need to sound calm, in control, and absolutely professional.

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Customer Service Outsourcing

You respect your clients, and you do everything you can to provide them with products that will satisfy their needs, but you and your teams have full schedules. You know that attending to customer needs is a must, but you’re caught between a rock and a hard place. You might divert resources you need elsewhere to customer service to cover peak demand, leaving other tasks and projects on hold. Or you have dedicated customer service agents who face sudden spikes in customer needs that they can barely cope with alternating with times when they’re just waiting around in case someone needs them.

Could customer service outsourcing be the solution? If you choose the right service provider, it can. They do the work, your customers are thrilled with the service they’re getting, and you get all the credit. You deserve to! After all, it’s your business that attracted those customers in the first place. But can you outsource customer service with confidence, and how does that benefit you and your customers?

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Considering the Outsourcing Question? Here’s Why You Should Talk to RSVP

We understand your reluctance to entrust your customer service – after all, without your customers, your business wouldn’t exist. That’s why we offer in-house-equivalence, doing as well as your own team can, as a starting point. After that, our next goal is to exceed anything you could have done without us – and our ever-growing portfolio of high-level clients is evidence of our success on that score. 

We’re so much more than “just another call centre” and we’re ready to prove our claims. Our London-based call centre employs, trains, and nurtures articulate, creative operatives. Our software keeps you informed on customer service analytics and helps us to join the dots in omnichannel communications. We represent you to the best of our ability – and we have evidence that our best is a cut above the rest. 

Let’s work together! We don’t just “answer the phone.” Instead, we’re invested in helping you to achieve your goals and our task is to ensure that you gain a reputation for superb customer service. Opportunity knocks. Will you open the door to customer service excellence? Contact us today!

Read our guide to customer experience (CX).
Read our guide to the omnichannel approach.

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How Customer Journey Touchpoints Create Customer Experiences

Presale Touchpoints

Marketing Materials

Presale touchpoints create awareness and draw in new customers. Perhaps you place advertisements or your brand is active on social media. The messages you send here are the first impressions you create, and they are vitally important. At a glance, customers form opinions, not only on what you offer, but who is offering it. 

Social Proof

Your existing customers may become presale touchpoints too. When someone who has nothing to gain from talking about your business tells others about their experiences, it will form a lasting impression. Although you aren’t always aware of word-of-mouth, the experiences people report are within your control.

Of course, it’s common practice for customers to search for reviews when deciding whether to make a purchase. You can’t (or shouldn’t) write reviews yourself, but you can influence what customers say about your business and its products. Deliver value and excellent service, and the third-party evidence mounts, optimising this touchpoint too.

Your Physical or Online Store

If your initial touchpoint interests people within your target market, they will take a closer look at what you do. For example, they may visit your store or website, read your blog, browse your products, or sign up for your newsletter. If your messaging at these touchpoints is consistent, it reinforces initial impressions, moving customers further down your sales funnel and closer to conversion. 

Point of Sale Touchpoints

You might think that touchpoints that lead people to form an intention to buy are half the battle, but point of sale touchpoints are even more important than anything that has gone before. 

Your mission is to make buying from you an action that customers can complete easily and with confidence that your product is right for them. When it comes to ease of purchase, many online businesses fail. 

• 35 percent of people can’t find the information they need to help them decide on a purchase
• 24 percent of people abandon carts because they have to create an account to make a purchase
• 49 percent do so because they discover that products cost more than they initially expected
• 18 percent find checkout processes too complex and abandon purchases in frustration
•  9 percent find that the store doesn’t support their preferred payment method

Optimising these touchpoints means identifying what customers want from them and providing just that. 

After-Sale Touchpoints

Having made a sale, you can’t rest on your laurels. With an investment in a purchase, customers will pay even closer attention to the touchpoints they experience. From delivery to service, support, and communications, paying customers will expect your business to fulfil its promises, recognise them as individuals, and take care of their needs. 

Customer Touchpoint Mapping

If you’re serious about selling, you’ll have mapped out customer journeys so that you have access to a customers’-eye-view of all the steps that lead to sales and promote customer retention. Customer touchpoint mapping provides further detail by identifying which interactions are relevant to each stage of your customers’ journeys. This helps you to understand customer mindsets and needs so that you can cater for them properly.

It’s a little more complex than it sounds. For example, if your website publishes a blog post, it represents a touchpoint. You should consider each post and decide whether it addresses customers at the top of the funnel, or those at the bottom of the funnel. Your content is shaped by its readership’s needs and these will differ depending on where they are in their journeys. 

The same is true of your newsletter. An undecided customer might like more information on why they should choose your product over its competitors. An existing customer won’t find that information valuable. Instead, they’d like to learn more about using your product. 

Optimising Customer Touchpoints

Once you’ve identified all the touchpoints that go into customer experiences, your task is to make them as good as they possibly can be. Areas to consider include:

• Crafting marketing messages that resonate with your target audience
• Creating an appealing and easily navigable store or website
• Taking steps to guide customers through the process (for example, calls to action)
• Providing information resources for self-service customers
• Allowing for omnichannel communication 
• Providing access to live agents who can assist customers and answer their questions
• Offering tools to enhance customer satisfaction. For example, demo videos and onboarding services
• Using social media to interact with customers – not just as a means of advertising
• Following up on sales to ensure customer satisfaction
• Offering effective after-sales help and support
• Building relationships through personalised newsletters and offers

Our top tips? Touchpoints are there to please your customers, so take a look at each of them from their perspective. And customers aren’t all the same, so search for common ground or ways to allow customers to shape their own journeys. 

Once you think you’ve got a good framework down, find out what your customers think about your efforts through surveys, feedback, and non-verbal messages they send out. For example, if website pages have a high bounce rate, they aren’t working as constructive touchpoints. 

In-Person Service As an Impactful Touchpoint

Digital tools and technologies make it easy for businesses to achieve more with less. But if there’s one area where this is not always effective, it’s in customer service interactions. As a technology magazine points out, it’s all too easy to become over reliant on technology without first thinking about how it impacts customer satisfaction. 

According to market research statistics:

• 39 percent of people will abandon a company for the simple reason that they can’t access in-person service. 
• 48 percent of people preferred to contact businesses over the phone.
• 66 percent reported a feeling of loyalty towards companies after successfully interacting with representatives
• 65 percent said they’d recommend a company offering good in-person service
• 48 percent said they were willing to spend more money after talking to a representative
• 43 percent said they felt emotionally connected to brands following interpersonal interaction

In an age in which interpersonal contact is becoming ever-more scarce, this presents a golden opportunity for brands who hope to set themselves apart from their competitors. In-person service is, without doubt, one of the most powerful touchpoints out there, but offering it can present challenges. 

Customers don’t want to be kept waiting. When they interact with representatives, they expect efficiency, empathy, and professionalism. For most businesses, offering this kind of service across channels and around the clock just isn’t possible. The solution, of course, is to outsource, but to do this effectively, you need to find the right company to act on your behalf. 

Enter RSVP, a London-based company that offers outsourced customer service to famous name brands and promising startups alike. Our metrics keep you informed, and our agents are the voices your customers want to hear. Looking for a genuine partnership with a company that will make you proud of your in-person service? Like all the best things in life, it begins with a conversation. Reach out today. 

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As with all things worth doing, customer experience is worth doing well, and that isn’t going to happen by accident. Instead, you’ll engage in a process in which you map customer journeys, carefully consider each step, and strategise accordingly. 

As part of your customer experience strategy, a customer experience framework refers to all the tools you’ll use and the methods you’ll employ as your business engages with customers. It covers each stage of customer journeys across every channel you use to communicate, and it aims to align your business’s goals with customers’ wants, needs, and expectations. 

The Process: Customer Experience Framework Examples

The nuts and bolts of your customer experience framework will be unique to your company and your customers. There are a variety of approaches to developing a customer experience framework. This is what they have in common. 

Use Customer Journey Mapping

Begin by determining your ideal target market and its segments. Now, consider how these people would discover your business, how they’d evaluate your products, what might lead to a purchasing decision, and everything that happens during and after a purchase. Use customer journey maps to develop an initial customer experience framework that strives to satisfy each type of customer.
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Measure

You’ve developed a framework of activities, tools, and processes that you hope will deliver positive experiences. It’s time to evaluate it and refine it. You’ll apply various measurements to determine how customers experience each step of the customer journey. These range from examining online behaviour to sending out surveys and interacting with customers.

You’ll get a lot of crucial information directly from your customers. Your Net Promoter Score (NPS), for instance,  says a lot about how customers experience your business. A typical NPS questionnaire asks customers how likely they’d be to recommend your business and offers them an opportunity to motivate the reasons behind the scores they allocate. Follow up low scores and analyse the reasons why these customers were not happy with their experiences. 

Take Action

Once you’ve identified the reasons why some of your customers aren’t entirely happy with their experiences, address the shortcomings that frustrate them and harm your business’s reputation. The faster you can act, the better. Actions can range from optimising interfaces and adjusting workflows and team structures to important details like perfecting customer onboarding processes. 

Monitor

To see how you’re doing, determine how your efforts are impacting customer satisfaction metrics. As they improve, you should start seeing direct financial benefits like enhanced profitability and increased revenue.  

The Pillars of a Customer Experience Framework

Strategy

Your strategy is the first pillar of a customer experience framework, but you won’t achieve a high level of customer satisfaction through strategy alone. After all, strategies are only as effective as the commitment you get from everyone that contributes to their fulfilment. 

Culture

This brings us to the second pillar: company culture. While customer service is often seen as a stand-alone support function, every functional department in your business should be prioritising customer service and satisfaction. Consider the practical implications of this and set KPIs. As the saying goes: “You get what you measure!”

Processes

The processes that lead to great customer experiences are designed to serve customer needs efficiently and effectively. Help your staff to make their contribution by developing processes that will do just that. As a knock-on benefit, efficiency and cost savings often go hand-in-hand. 

Tools

Technology offers many ways to avoid dropped balls and automate routine processes for greater efficiency. While your initial investment in tech tools may be costly, they will help you to set up and monitor workflows while automatically performing some of the tasks that go into them. You can also use tech tools to analyse processes and gather and interpret data.

Feedback

All this effort isn’t worthwhile if you’re not achieving your aim, and your customers are the best people to tell you whether you are. Since your staff are at the coalface, they may have valuable input too. Gather feedback and put it to good use.  

Best Practices For Implementing Your CX Framework

Remember, It’s a Dynamic Process

Implementing a CX framework is a good place to start, but it’s only the beginning. If you did your homework, you need only tweak the occasional process or make minor adjustments. But, small as these changes may be, they’re important. You may also find that customer needs change over time and being responsive, or even pre-empting trends could give you a competitive advantage. 

Prioritise Your Target Market

Most businesses earn 80 percent of their revenue from 20 percent of their customers. While it may not be possible to please all people all the time, this 20 percent deserves special attention. Know who they are, what they want, and how you can make your mark through experiences they’ll be happy to repeat and recommend.  

But what about the other 80 percent? The good news is that crafting a great experience for your ideal customers means you’re likely to satisfy most of your other customers, even though the experience wasn’t specifically tailored for them. 

Keep Listening, Measuring, and Acting on Data

Many businesses gather valuable information they never use. It represents a wealth of missed opportunities. Just having data is not an advantage. Paying attention to it, analysing it, and using it to guide your strategies can have untold benefits. If you’re committed to CX, you never just “set and forget.”

Empower Your Employees

Addressing customer pain points doesn’t always require a committee. Knowledgeable employees who can act fast to deliver positive customer experiences will be a valuable asset. Make it clear that you value their input too. Your people may know about inefficiencies that hinder customer service and they may have effective solutions in mind. 

Plan for Exceptions

No matter how carefully you plan and implement your customer experience framework to suit most of your customers, there will be times when generic solutions don’t work. That’s fine, as long as you have contingency plans that allow for creative problem-solving when exceptions occur. 

Handling Exceptions: Human Contact is a Must

Automation allows business to guide customer experience in the right direction, but human contact is all-too-often the missing ingredient that leads to poor customer experiences. If you planned your customer experience framework well, most of your customers won’t need to talk to your representatives. But when exceptions occur, your customers will expect instant access to real people. 

According to the Customer Rage Survey, there’s one very simple reason why customers become infuriated – it’s hard to get in touch and air a complaint. Consumers complain about difficulty in contacting the businesses they support. When they do get in touch, they often experience long wait times that compound their frustration. 

Needless to say, this gap in the customer experience framework leads to negative reviews. Each one of these not only represents a lost customer, but serves to deter new customers who might otherwise have supported your business. As for negative word-of-mouth, it’s a given. 

This presents a problem for many companies. We all know that customers seeking responses want immediate answers. And the volume of calls and emails isn’t constant. For example, a SaaS company may experience a barrage of calls during a service outage, and very few when everything is running as normal. 

At RSVP, we offer an elegant solution. Outsourced customer service really can help bridge the gap between remote customers and businesses – provided you choose a high calibre, scalable solution. 

Hoping to offer customer experiences that build relationships and loyalty? Let’s talk. Eager to gather strategically important information directly from your customers? We’ll listen on your behalf and provide the data-driven insights you need. Let’s get the ball rolling. Reach out today. 

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That’s why most definitions of customer engagement speak about the activities you undertake to create engagement. It’s a relationship that’s built on customer experiences, and develops beyond initial purchases. 

Not sure where to begin? Understanding what customers want is a good start. 

Customer Engagement Strategies: Giving Your Customers What They Want

Customer engagement strategies help you to develop business relationships that feel very personal, regardless of how many customers you serve. You probably have an instinct for relationship-building already, but looking at what customers prefer can help to guide your strategies. Keep these principles in mind as you work to transform your business from a means to an end to an “old friend” whom your customers trust. 

Personalisation and Omnichannel Recognition

Customer data allows you to personalise offers and communications – be sure to use data in accordance with privacy laws. When necessary, ask customers for permission to use their information. Tell customers about the data you gather, how you store and protect it, and how you use it. Most people will feel comfortable about their data being used to enhance the service they receive provided you’re transparent. 

Customer data helps you to build customer profiles that enable you to engage across channels. For example, if a customer buys something in store and then engages with your company on social media, you’re able to acknowledge them as someone you “know,” rather than a complete stranger. 

Most people are aware that you’re achieving this with a little technological assistance, but they still love the feeling of being engaged in a seamless “conversation” with your brand that spans all the channels they like to use. 

Excellent Customer Service

There are times when people need help when interacting with your business or its products. At the same time, many of them will struggle along on their own for as long as possible, becoming increasingly frustrated in the process. Good customer service means offering help on demand. Excellent customer service means offering help before it’s asked for.  

Software companies have the edge here. They’re able to spot signs that a customer is struggling to realise value from their products and customer success managers can ensure they’re offered the assistance they need. However, any business can inform customers about the resources at their disposal and invite them to get in touch if they would like help or advice. 

Fast Response Times

Very few businesses can afford to keep their customers waiting. Think about the last time you were left kicking your heels while you waited for service. It’s quite likely that you regretted your purchase and vowed never to support the business again. Now think about the businesses that never leave you waiting and who always seem to welcome opportunities to hear from you. They make you feel important – and as a customer, that’s just how it should be.

Consistency

Do you have a favourite restaurant? Chances are they enjoy your support because you know you can always expect a great dining experience. If they let you down, you may not be back for more. In the same way, your business should offer consistent quality and service your customers can rely on. They’ll be proud to say they have a relationship with your brand. 

Positive Emotional Connection

When businesses go out of their way to help customers feel good, they’ll be remembered for all the right reasons. Many businesses do this well right up to the point where they make a sale and then stop working on the relationship after that. Simply thanking people for their business is a good start. Making it clear that you’re still there for them, staying in touch, and involving them in decision making takes the relationship to the next level. 

Problem Resolution

In an interesting experiment, researchers reached out to clients who had vented their frustration about airline service on social media. They asked respondents which airlines they would support. Formerly unhappy customers who had been contacted by airline representatives following their complaints had become staunch advocates. 

They still expressed support even when the flights were more expensive than competing offers. And they had greater brand loyalty than people who had never complained about airline services. The message is clear: effective problem resolution helps to build relationships and boosts customer engagement. 

Rewards

Who can resist earning rewards when buying things they need anyway? Supermarkets have long recognised the value of loyalty cards that offer repeat customers something extra. Your business can reward customer loyalty too. 

Whether it’s discounts, free gifts, or exclusive VIP features, customers love an opportunity to earn a little bonus as part of your brand’s “family.” You’ll be working hard to develop loyal customers, and providing recognition for their repeat business or referrals is your way of thanking them. 

Content Marketing

Offering valuable information for free earns you a reputation as an authority in your field and helps customers make the most of your products. For example, a clothing retailer can share content about the latest fashion trends or offer tips for accessorising. A bookseller can provide book reviews and information about upcoming releases from favourite authors, and so on. Give your content extra mileage via social media and your newsletters. 

Newsletters

Getting newsletters just right can be something of an art. Formulate them for interest and enjoyment and ensure that your customers feel rewarded for the time they take reading them. If you’re implementing personalisations, you can even develop different newsletters for different types of customers. 

Customer Surveys

Asking your customers for feedback and ideas is always a great idea. Those who are willing to share their thoughts will be happy to know that their ideas are being used to improve your business or its products, so be sure to keep them posted. 

Social Media Interaction

While social media is great for marketing, it also gives you a great opportunity to boost customer engagement. Interact with customers by responding to their comments, share positive posts in which your business was mentioned, and boost engagement by running contests. Remember to implement social media listening and don’t shy away from engaging with dissatisfied customers. 

Gamification

Love it or hate it, Temu has mastered the art of gamification, offering users minigames in which they can win discounts and prizes. Everybody loves a fun challenge, and few can resist a bargain, so consider adding gamified content to ecommerce platforms and apps. Apart from boosting sales, these games are a form of instant engagement which the BBC has described as “as addictive as sugar.” 

Build a Community

Harley Davidson provides a great example of how brands can build communities that engage customers. Building on a strong brand, the company offers members a sense of “belonging,” plus opportunities to connect with other enthusiasts. People love to talk to others who share their hobbies and interests. Look for ways to bring your community together. 

Exclusive Offers and Events

Signing up to your community, loyalty programme or VIP club can come with extra benefits. Exclusive offers and special events will send a clear message to your customers, showing them that they are important to you. Invite them to product launches, online events, or offer them products that no one else has access to. Help customers to develop a sense of being involved in a special relationship. 

Why You Need a Customer Engagement Strategy

Bearing in mind that customer engagement is all about relationships, you can’t afford to leave it to chance. Gaining new customers is costly, so fostering engagement and achieving brand loyalty and repeat business makes sound economic sense. 

By paving the way for engagement, you’ll gain valuable feedback from customers, helping you to see things from their perspective. This helps you to perfect customer experiences and further enhance customer engagement.  

Customer Experience (CX) vs Customer Engagement

As we noted in the introduction, customer experiences are the foundation for customer engagement, but they are only the beginning. Customer experiences are enhanced by optimising every touchpoint. Customer engagement is achieved through relationship building. Stay in touch. Offer value. Be supportive. Listen to feedback and demonstrate appreciation. Always be honest and live up to your commitments. It’s the stuff of which good friendships are made. 

Customer Satisfaction vs Customer Engagement

A satisfied customer is a valuable asset, but they aren’t yet an engaged customer. After all, you can feel satisfied with a purchase without feeling as if you have a relationship with the company you supported. Of course customer satisfaction makes it possible to turn passing trade into engaged customers who are actively involved in your brand, but it’s only among the first steps toward engagement.

Customer Engagement Metrics

There are several metrics that can give you some idea of customer engagement levels. For example, you can look at customer lifetime value, repeat purchases, customer churn, and customer retention rates. Software businesses can look at customer usage rates, and businesses that offer an app can look at how much time customers spend using it. 

A customer engagement score brings several metrics together. For example, it can measure customers’ social media engagement combined with email opening and clickthrough rates, app usage, and website visits. 

Customer Engagement Platforms

Tracking customer engagement manually would be almost impossible. Fortunately, the same software you use for important features like customer profiling, segmentation and omnichannel communication can often serve as customer engagement platforms. 

Depending on the platform you use, you can run campaigns, check their results, collect and analyse customer feedback and implement engagement tracking and analytics.  

The Vital Link Between Customer Service and Customer Engagement

Customer service, in particular, in-person service, helps to drive engagement. When customers have experienced excellent service from your company, they’re more likely to engage in other ways. For example, they may interact with your business on social media and they’re more likely to participate in referral programmes. 

In a recent report, PwC warns companies about becoming so technology focused that they lose the human touch. The research company notes that up to 82 percent of consumers these days want human interaction, a startling finding at a time when so many businesses are moving away from interpersonal contact. In fact, 59 percent of consumers feel that human interactions are being neglected these days.

However, the report highlights something you probably know already: now, more than ever, people don’t want to wait for customer service. It must be immediate, efficient, professional, and friendly. This poses a challenge for businesses who are hoping to achieve longer-term engagement from customers. How many customer service agents should they have at any given time? What about after-hours enquiries? And how will they recruit the superior quality agents that customers want to interact with?

RSVP offers you an all-in-one solution. Outsourced customer service really can be better than anything you can offer in-house. Living up to this principle has made us one of the UK’s most respected customer service businesses. 

We do far more than just learning enough about your business to act as its representatives. We work with you to achieve your business’s goals. From boosting customer retention to giving you valuable information on client opinions, we’re the human element your customers want and the centre where they can make their voices heard. 

Wondering about all that wonderful technology that helps you connect the dots and measure customer engagement? We’re people-driven but technologically enabled. Get the best of both worlds with RSVP. 

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Sounds like a conundrum? Let’s take a closer look at different types of customers and how knowing who is who and what they want affects the service you offer. Let’s illustrate the various types of customers and their points of view by using a simple example: a shirt. 

Window Shoppers

“Oh look! There’s a nice shirt.”

Even if you do business online, you’ll get your share of window shoppers. They’re interested enough to take a look at what you do, but they don’t really have any intention to buy and prefer to be unobtrusive. So, what can you do to turn “just looking” into sales?

Just as high-street boutiques work to make their displays enticing, so should you. For online businesses, this means making your storefront an attention-grabber. And, since window shoppers prefer not to interact just yet, make sure that they have all the information they need to evaluate products that catch their eye. 

List product features unambiguously. Explain their benefits clearly. And, whatever else you do, don’t leave window shoppers in the dark about pricing. 

Impulse Customers 

“I wasn’t looking for a shirt, but I noticed this one.”

Impulse customers arrived on a whim. They saw something, liked it, and although they weren’t actually planning to buy anything, they’re open to making a purchase. They want to know if the item is “for” them.  

Many businesses think that their products are for “everyone,” but that’s seldom the case. Just about every business has its ideal customers, its OK customers, and niche customers that may come along for the ride. 

Remember the pareto principle. You’ll get 80 percent of your sales from 20 percent of your customers. Know who they are and make it abundantly clear that your product is for them. 

Potential Customers

“I want to buy a shirt.”

Almost anyone can be a potential customer, but in this context, we’re referring to people who are genuinely thinking about buying your products. Whether you know it or not, they’re already halfway down your sales funnel, and their question is: “Will this product solve my problem?”

Potential customers are hot property because they are almost sure to buy if they’re happy with your value proposition. Their circumstances have led them to explore a purchase, and they’re looking for a match. Perhaps our shopper wants a smart business shirt, one that matches their favourite suit. They’ll be looking at details that matter to them and they may have questions you weren’t prepared for. 

Pre-empt as many of these questions as you can and make it easy for them to ask someone for more information. Assuming you’ve bought a shirt in the past, what would you do if nobody was around when you needed service? Be ready to help your customers. 

Your priorities with potential customers: give them easily-accessible information and be ready to offer service. 

Discount Customers

“I want to buy a shirt, but I don’t want to pay the full price.”

There will always be bargain hunters. Before you close your eyes and groan, think about how you can use this to your advantage. 

Sell two shirts at a slight discount instead of one at full price. Offer a discount for signing up or referring friends. Throw in a discounted tie. Give them a coupon to use on their next purchase. The possibilities are endless and almost all of them offer you better revenue than you’d get from simply selling a shirt at the listed price. 

Best of all, almost everyone likes a bargain, so apart from attracting the die-hard cut-price crowd, your offer may be just the thing to sway undecided customers. 

Determined Customers

“I want a Tommy Hilfiger 100 percent cotton shirt in duck-egg blue.”

Determined customers are on a quest for something specific. If you don’t have it, they won’t buy it. All the same, if you have something very close to what they want, they might consider it. 

A search feature on your e-commerce store should be able to come up with both direct matches and near-matches. Don’t have what the customer asked for? You can highlight the reasons why a Yves St Laurent shirt is as good or better – or why a soft shade of teal is almost indistinguishable from duck egg blue. In many instances, you’ll rely on website automations to do the job for you. After all, determined customers aren’t very prone to asking questions. 

Your mission? Give determined customers exactly what they want or offer them the nearest alternative to what they want. 

New Customers

“I just bought a shirt from X.”

New customers have made a purchase. That’s great, but you can do better! Your job is to turn them into loyal customers. Begin by thanking them and telling them what happens next. It’s also good manners to check in to see if they’re happy with their purchase. And yes, you can automate this. 

But, if your new customer is in need of help, you have to be there for them. And, even a transaction as simple as this can become complex. Perhaps the shirt isn’t the exact shade of blue your customer thought it would be. Or the collar is a trifle tight. Or the delivery doesn’t go smoothly.

Most of your customers won’t have any issues at all, but for those who do, being there to help them, and going the extra mile to ensure satisfaction, is hugely important.

Loyal Customers

“I always buy my shirts from X.”

Customer loyalty is an accolade that tells you you’re doing everything just right. Loyal customers are people who will buy, buy, and buy again. Best of all, they’ll keep buying from you even if you don’t make any extra effort. Your marketing aims to attract new customers. Your product quality and service quality keep them, justifying your marketing costs through their years of support for your brand. 

But, as even the most committed will tell you, relationships require maintenance. With loyal customers, your task is to keep them loyal by offering a product and service package that’s better than anything they can find elsewhere. Give them recognition. Offer them incentives. Let them know how much you value them. 

Angry Customers

“I just bought a shirt from the worst company ever!”

Flinching? You’ve just been granted one of the best opportunities ever! Grab it with both hands. Here’s why angry customers are so awesome. A study showed that angry customers can easily become even more loyal than those who experienced no problems at all. It’s all in how you face the challenge. 

Going out of your way to make things right with angry customers means they experience interpersonal connection – something that’s all-too-rare in today’s world. While we don’t suggest deliberately angering your customers, rising to the challenge could be the best thing you ever did to enhance your business’s reputation. 

Got a furious customer on the line? Thank them sincerely for bringing the matter to your attention. Sympathise with their plight. Show them how you will correct the issue and what you will do to make sure it never happens again. Your reward? You get some really good information you can use to improve your business – and you might just end up with a brand advocate!

Churned Customers

“I used to buy my shirts from X.”

Whether they were once loyal customers or bought your product once never to return, churned customers may yet become your customers again. Sometimes, it’s not your fault. For example, a churned customer’s circumstances may have changed and they no longer need your product. But there’s a multitude of other reasons why they may have taken their business elsewhere. You can do something about it!

Try to get feedback. Adjust your offer to make it more attractive. For example, you might offer an incentive or an exclusive deal. You can even do both of these at once. It’s really helpful knowing why customers move on, and if the fault is yours, you have an opportunity to win them back. Reach out and offer an opportunity to connect. 

Brand Advocates

“Need a shirt? I suggest getting one from X!”

Brand advocates aren’t just happy customers. They’re delighted and they want to tell all their friends about how great your business is. Because they’re customers rather than employees, they have a high level of credibility. After all, they wouldn’t recommend you if they hadn’t had a great experience. 

Of course, you’ll aim to turn all your customers into brand advocates, and the best way to do it is to offer satisfying products and excellent service. If you’re already head-and-shoulders above your competitors on quality, service, or both, you’ll gain advocates as a matter of course.

Referred Customers

“Here’s my referral code to get a special offer on a shirt.”

Many companies offer referral programmes. You’re sure to have encountered them. Many of them work through referral codes that are given to customers. If their friends use the referral code, both the new and the original customer gets rewarded. It’s like brand advocacy, but with a little incentive thrown in. 

Referral programmes are particularly effective when you’re facing strong competition. Other companies offer similar products at similar prices. But by taking advantage of a referral, customers get a better price and help their friends gain something too. 

Referred customers present a huge opportunity. Treat them well, and you’ll gain loyal customers and a relationship that could last for years. 

International Customers

“Cuéntame sobre las camisetas que vendes.”

You always wanted your business to be world-famous. Now, international customers are getting in touch. But not all of them speak English. Should you leave them to the tender mercies of Google Translate? If they call you, will you just speak slowly and very clearly?

If you’re starting to attract international customers, it’s time to go multilingual. And, it’s time to transcend time zones. Speak your customers’ language. Connect. 

How to Speak to Absolutely any Kind of Customer

If you’re guessing that you’ll need some pretty awesome software to deal effectively with all these different types of customers, you’re right! 

If you suspect that 24/7 customer care is what most customers not only want but expect, you’re perfectly correct. 

If you believe that leaving them on hold is a bad idea, you’re in touch with your customers’ point of view. 

And, if you’re equally sure that you need to offer knowledgeable and professional customer service agents, you’re right on target.

But, if you thought the only way to do this was in-house, and are shuddering at the thought of all the extra management work, it’s time to relax. 

No, you don’t want “just anyone” talking to your customers. You want trained, empowered, intelligent, empathetic and articulate individuals to represent your business. And, since you know that listening to your customers is important, you’d like intel that’s almost as good as anything you could learn by talking to them yourself. 

If this describes you, you’re ready to put RSVP to the test. Outsourced customer service really can be the best solution. We’ll show you how. Let’s team up!

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