How to Improve Customer Service: Strategies for Success

An excellent level of customer service is more important than ever

Customer expectations mirror the expectations of society. Instant gratification dictates today’s world. Technology has advanced, and expectations are for everything to be as quick and painless as possible. Especially when it comes to communication.

Many companies now have technologically advanced systems to handle their customer service workload, such as automated messaging systems, chatbots, limited contact options, and self-service options. However, these options may cause longer communication timelines and solutions not completely tailored to a customer’s needs.

Evolving customer expectations means strong strategies are key to customer retention.

Customers expect real-time, personalized, and insightful service. And commerce in today’s market is more competitive than ever. So, providing excellent customer service is more important than ever and can set a business apart from its competitors.

Efficiency and speed are especially important to today’s customers. Using visuals when interacting with customers leads to faster resolutions, happier customers, and shorter wait times.

You need the right tools to create an effective customer service experience that fosters loyalty in your customer base.

Going above and beyond for your customers has become the norm rather than a rare experience. Arm your team with a problem-solving toolbox that includes empathy, real-time support, and clear visuals.

This will help to emphasize understanding and provide actionable steps.

Train your customer support team to be empathetic and solution-oriented

Empathy is your key customer service strategy

Empathetic customer service delights customers and also benefits your customer support team in ways you might not expect.

A recent study found that “training employees to focus on how good customer service benefits themselves creates a positive feedback loop. This will benefit customers, service providers, and organizations alike.”

Happy support teams make for happy customers, and vice versa!

Great customer service naturally requires soft skills that lead to better outcomes for your organization and customers. When support teams truly connect with customers, they feel empowered to go the extra mile.

Training your customer support team to listen to and truly understand customer concerns will empower them to respond thoughtfully. Your team should be on the customer’s side, solving the problem together.

Fewer touchpoints and more meaningful interactions, supported by easy-to-understand visuals, cross-training strategies, and personalized service, will help your team to connect with customers on a human level.

A positive feedback loop that runs both ways will retain a happy team, and your team’s personal connection with your customers will retain a happy customer base.

Better problem-solving techniques lead to faster resolutions

Problem-solving is a key skill that successful customer service teams possess. Many customer contacts require a careful eye to sift through information and determine the exact issue and what may be the cause.

Problem-solving skills lead to reduced solution times and more personalized solutions.

No situation is cookie-cutter. Tailoring solutions to a particular customer leads to higher customer satisfaction than meeting just some of their needs with a formulaic response or a chatbot designed to help the masses.

Customer service teams should know the parameters of their abilities so they can have the agency to problem solve the best resolution with both the interests of the company and the customer in mind.

Personalize the customer experience

Data helps your organization understand customer needs

A study from leading customer service expert Shep Hyken on the benefits of personalized customer experiences found that “81% of customers prefer companies that offer a personalized experience, and 70% say a personalized experience in which the employee knows who they are and their history with the company (past purchases, buying patterns, support calls and more) is important.”

When support teams use customer data to understand preferences, it leads to greater customer satisfaction.

Using a customer’s name is great, and customer support agents can pull that data from prior tickets and interactions, but beyond that, you should always have a secure log of notes and background that agents can refer to.

Your teams need to see if a customer has had the same problem before or if they’re noticing a pattern of issues affecting multiple customers, which isn’t possible without access to customer contact history.

Nobody likes having to repeat themselves, especially when they’re already running into issues and are trying to explain a tough-to-described technical issue or frustrating billing problem.

Teams can quickly refer back to earlier tickets to tailor solutions to a customer’s specific needs without making them say the same thing for the fifteenth time. Keeping a record of past support can make the difference between a returning customer and a lost one.

Customer data empowers your support team

Equip your customer service team with powerful, user-friendly tools, such as a ticketing system that tracks customer history and includes essential features like agent notes.

A hallmark of great customer service is taking advantage of the support tools included in a ticketing system to log past tickets and track customer contact and preferences.

Being greeted by name by a friendly agent with a thorough understanding of your history with the company feels like walking into your neighborhood spot!

With the right tools, your support team can easily look back and see if the customer they’re helping has faced similar issues before and view background information that can help resolve their current problem faster. Highly personalized support using individualized information stored in a secure database is a great way to improve your customer service.

Provide the real-time support your customers expect

Real-time support is a game-changer

Customers expect easy, quick options to communicate with companies, such as live chat and phone support. This type of real-time communication has become a crucial part of everyday life, so companies must provide customer service modes that are familiar and readily available to customers.

Customers should be encouraged to send visuals like screenshots and attachments to customer service representatives while communicating through chat or email.

Incorporating this into a contact strategy is extremely helpful for the agent. It also leads to reduced resolution times and an improved overall customer experience since many customers already use tools like Snagit and Screencast in their normal workflow.

Real-time support builds trust and loyalty

Providing real-time support options leads to happy, loyal customers who want to do business with you.

Just like any relationship, the customer-business relationship are built on trust. “83 percent of consumers say they will not do business with brands they don’t trust.” A good customer service experience builds trust in your company and, by extension, your products or services!

Another facet of trust-building is having a customer service team that is confident in their ability to assist a customer and in the information they provide. Instilling trust in customers by showing that agents are knowledgeable and truly have the customer’s best interest at heart will increase customer retention.

Reach your service-level goals with screenshots and GIFs

Visuals lead to customer service efficiency

Data shows that customers prefer receiving visual solutions, and these visuals also lead to reduced time to a solution and reduced future touchpoints with customer support.

It’s a win-win when you can achieve customer satisfaction using a method that’s easier and simpler for your customer support team.

Using visuals to enhance your written content helps the customer understand your message better, and the customer support agent spends less time trying to rephrase the perfect sentence.

How support teams use visual support in action

Screenshots are key, but we’ve also found that using video content to highlight steps in a process is another great way to provide excellent customer service that’s both streamlined and personalized to the customer’s specific issue.

Customer service agents get great customer feedback when they can refer to a specific part of a video when troubleshooting an issue.

Visuals don’t just have to mean in-depth videos, though. Anyone on your customer support team can use Snagit to quickly create a repeating GIF to add to a support article or chat with a customer to show how to complete a few-step process.

Capture a video with Snagit and press GIF when you’re done – seriously, that’s it. GIFs are fast, fun, and, most importantly, easy for customers to consume.

Use Snagit to create professional, helpful visuals

Do you want to cut your email touches in half?

TechSmith studied whether support tickets with images or videos mean a faster response rate or fewer touches.

We found that they do!

When we pulled data from the tickets of our technical support team, we learned that the agents used Snagit 65% of the time.

These tickets always had a faster resolution rate than those that didn’t include images – by half.

Step-by-step solutions significantly reduce back-and-forth communication, which frees up time for your agents and customers.

Customers also benefit when they send images to support teams. Train your support teams to ask customers for a screenshot of the issue and see how quickly issues get resolved when long descriptions are removed from the equation.

It might surprise you how quickly support teams find their own clever ways to use visual tools to save time.

Turning a 1-2-3 teachable moment into a screenshot, GIF, or micro video and sending a shareable link to the customer makes a keepsake that the customer can refer to any time, rather than opening up a new chat or picking up the phone again.

Customer support teams that pull from a shared collection of annotated images get great results when using these to direct customers to use a specific workflow. Arrows, steps, and callouts in screenshots sent to customers help greatly when troubleshooting technical software issues or even showing customers how to update their billing information.

Snagit can store your organization’s design colors and preferred fonts to create a theme to use throughout your documentation. Make images agents send crisp and professional, no matter who created them. To see how these simple tools can help you boost your documentation and make life easier for your customers, check out the Snagit trial for free here: https://www.techsmith.com/download/snagit/

Collect and act on customer feedback

Feedback from your customers brings continuous improvement

Continuous improvement is necessary in today’s market, especially for organizations that aim to deliver service at the high standard their customers have grown to expect.

When developing your team’s customer service strategy or taking it to the next level, keep it simple – listen to what your customers are telling you.

Your customer support team is on the front lines of your business and can quickly notice patterns and report back.

We all know customers don’t hold back from sharing candid feedback on social media. Members of your customer service team can monitor keywords and mentions to make sure you’re supporting customers everywhere they are.

Whether you’re reaching out to a specific person to make things right or noticing posts referencing one of your products or services, use social media to your advantage and snag that feedback!

Having agents send surveys to customers is one way to grab data quickly. Teams can also send follow-ups to check in on the status of an issue, which makes customers happy you remembered!

Personalized contact in the form of a 7-day or 8-day follow-up message can be easy to set up in your ticketing system. It will help you on the path of continuous improvement and enhanced customer experiences overall.

Act on customer feedback to improve service levels

Team leaders and managers know that customer feedback is important when streamlining processes and determining better workflows for their agents. Businesses can turn feedback into actionable steps for customer support teams, which will, in turn, increase customer retention and loyalty.

Gathering and acting on feedback also helps your support team take part in growing your business as a whole.

A major but often overlooked part of excellent customer service is learning from your customers and determining their needs.

Don’t just fix an issue on an individual level every time a customer calls in about the same problem again and again; grab data and take that pattern to the team that has a hand in fixing it.

Support teams can easily use visuals as examples to share with other teams.

A customer service team member can annotate a customer’s screenshot with their own notes to highlight issues or suggest improvements.

Knowing that they’re providing constructive feedback internally to improve products or processes will improve your customer service experience and make your team feel good about the contributions they’re making to the company itself.

 The positive feedback loop that comes from knowing you’re making a difference at your organization acts as a built-in incentive to gather data.

Using visuals like annotated screenshots turns feedback into actionable steps that improve processes every step of the way.

Invest in support team training and development

Ongoing training builds an effective customer service team

Continuous training for your support team is necessary when providing products or services to a growing and changing customer base. Creating training documentation for your customer support team doesn’t have to be time-consuming or contain endless wordy descriptions.

Providing your customer service team with async training sessions via short-form videos and screenshots allows your team to keep up with changes without attending hours-long training sessions or lengthy meetings.

Extended meetings take your team away from the front lines and often mean coming back to an overflowing inbox of waiting customers or lots of voicemails to return.

Long emails and memos are often overwhelming, filled with irrelevant details, and difficult to remember.

We find that team members are much happier to receive quick and simple visual updates and feedback on internal changes.

As a bonus, if your team has easy access to simple visuals and engaging videos on your organization’s products or services and how they work, they can continuously train on the spot without taking time away from live coverage.

When training is served in bite-sized and friendly bits, teams see it as another part of their daily work rather than a frustrating experience.

When your customer service representatives feel confident in performing their daily tasks, knowing they can easily grab the resources and information they need, they’ll naturally provide better customer service.

Cross-training for flexibility and efficiency

We know that customer-centric information is important, but what about cross-training between teams?

Customer-facing team members perform better and retain a wider knowledge base when they have access to information in the form of maps, flowcharts, tables, and easily digestible images from other internal teams.

Creators, developers, and engineers who work on products and systems often face disconnect with front-of-house, customer-facing teams, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Cross-train your team to handle a wide range of customer questions. Watch wait times decrease like magic when your team doesn’t have to wait for an email from another department or dig for an answer.

Increased efficiency comes from both agent flexibility to handle questions and an easily digestible and easy-to-access knowledge base from which to pull.

Ensure you build a bridge between your customer support team and the rest of the company. This will allow your organization to access customer feedback and make your team feel heard.

Effective communication between departments makes it easier for customer support teams to have access to what they need when they need it. When customers expect fast resolutions, easy access is practically a requirement for success.

Customer support team managers who forge connections between their team and others know that all impacted teams find it greatly rewarding.

Improve self-service options for your customers

Customers prefer self-service tools

Modern customers often prefer to resolve their own issues without having to contact support.

Sometimes assuming that it will take a long time before their issue gets resolved, customers like to take matters into their own hands more and more frequently.

Customers have been burned by long wait times and never-ending back-and-forth chats with agents who don’t want to take the time to resolve their problems, so make your business stand out by providing fast, simple, and friendly service.

By raising the standards of your self-service materials on your website, you can empower your customers to find answers quickly, which is exactly what they expect. Not only does this make for satisfied customers, but it also means way less strain on your support team.

Strong customer service strategies that support self-service don’t just mean a helpful online account system, though.

You also need easy-to-locate and thorough but simple guides for your customers so they can navigate those systems. Let them know what to expect so they can feel confident to solve their own issues.

Adding visuals like screenshots and GIFs to your support articles helps customers plot their own course as they visit your website and manage their accounts. Learn how to turn a short video into a friendly and easy-to-consume GIF that you can add to your customer-facing knowledge base!

Wordy documentation isn’t very helpful, especially if customers are trying to find information fast.

Images lead to pattern recognition, which helps customers remember what to do next time without needing to return to your article or reach back out to customer support.

If your goal is customer retention, train your customers to access what they need on their own. Make it easy, but be there to catch them if they need support.

Visuals and tutorials for self-service success

Our own support teams use Snagit every day to create high-quality visuals that boost our customer-facing and internal support articles.

Help articles with strong, clear visuals lead to greater understanding and enhance customers’ interactions with the self-service tools we provide. Your customers can also benefit from visuals when it comes to self-service.

Easy access to visual guides will improve the way your customers interact with your organization’s self-service systems and, in turn, lead to fewer touchpoints with customer service teams.

Super-quick resolution times and fewer back-and-forths between agents and customers are picture-perfect proof that using visuals to aid with support is a winning strategy.

Even complex issues benefit from visuals. Rather than reading a long series of boring how-to steps from an agent, a customer can spend a minute or two watching a video with easy-to-see mouse clicks and arrows letting them know exactly what to do next.

Improve your response times

The impact of fast response times on customer satisfaction

The goal of a customer service team should be to resolve a customer’s issue effectively and efficiently. Swift response times show that the company values the customer’s time and is committed to solving their issue, which is the heart of customer satisfaction.

However, customer contact is constantly rushing in.

It never stops.

So, it can be easy for a customer service team to feel like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill if they are not working towards a set objective. Customer service agents need to see the impact they make.

Setting goals is an effective way to motivate customer service teams to meet the Service Level Agreements standards you set.

Use Snagit and Screencast to provide visual progress updates. A customer service team needs to know that the set expectations are realistic and important.

Little reminders help a customer service team to push themselves further, ensure customer satisfaction, and raise levels of service. When goals are achieved, and customers are happy, they spread their satisfaction through social media and reviews.

Strategies to reduce response times

A picture is worth a thousand words. As previously discussed, research shows that visuals reduce customer touchpoints and provide more information quicker.

But, a customer service team needs to be equipped with the mindset to assist customers efficiently.

Part of that efficiency is built from an agent’s side of real-time support. They need to progress the conversation with clear and direct messages to the customer.

 It is ideal to find a balance between being personable and friendly and being solution-oriented.

The customer service agent cannot allow the conversation to stall. They need to ensure all communication flows towards the solution in an understandable way.

The company’s ability to set up a customer service team for success has an important role in cutting solution times. Having pre-made phrases and visuals that an agent can customize quickly to suit a particular customer’s needs will help prepare them to assist anyone effectively and efficiently.

Also, having visuals that customers can use to self-service while waiting on a customer service agent’s response, or even before reaching out, is an effective strategy that can reduce time to a solution.

Conclusion

Improving your customer service experience is a never-ending process. Your customers expect continued improvement, which is necessary if your organization wants to keep up with ever-changing demands.

If your goal is to generate effective, personalized customer service strategies that work for your team and your customers, visuals can aid in their training and boost how they support your customers.

Customer loyalty is often hard-won, so make it easy on your team with the right software to support your organization’s customer experience goals.

Seamlessly enhancing the customer experience becomes just another part of your everyday workflow when you invest in the right tools for the job, like Snagit and Screencast Pro.