In business, trust is everything.
You lose that, and poof, there goes your business.
As humans, we are wired to function with the emotion of trust. In fact, our entire society, dare I say civilization, is built on trust.
For instance, you took a cab to work this morning, without knowing if the driver has ever driven before. You put your money in the bank trusting that the institution wouldn’t close down by tomorrow morning.
I could go on and on.
In the world of business, the same is true. You only do business with brands that you trust. And your customers feel the same way, too.
A research showed that 90% of customers say they will stop doing business with a brand if trust broken down. Plus, 50% of them said they will leave the brand immediately.
This shows you the profound importance of trust in business.
In the first place, trust is a product of interaction. When a customer’s interaction with your business goes well, trust is born. This is why your customer service is crucial to the bottom line of your business.
Your customer service is the major point of interaction between your brand and customers. Therefore, they can serve as a tool to build trust. Your customer service should make it easy for customers to get what they want and receive quick and helpful answers to their queries.
And how do you do this?
In this article, I have outlined 5 ways you can build trust through customer service.
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Speed Things Up
The need for speed is the number one reason for advancement in technology in this century. It’s the reason we went from riding horses to driving cars. In fact, it’s the reason we rode horses in the first place.
The world of business is fast-paced world, thanks to technology. And customers want things done quickly for them. They want quick response to queries and problems resolved in not time.
To achieve this, you can create a self-service or FAQ platform to handle basic questions quickly. This will eliminate the need for direct contact, thus granting your customer service staff more time to deal with more pressing issues.
Alternatively, you could also provide your customer service agent with response templates to enable them answer regular question.
Overall, this reduces the amount of time your customers have to wait to get answers to their questions.
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Build Consistency And Accuracy
When customers ask a question, they want to be sure that they will get an accurate answer. An inaccurate answer can cause the customer to make a bad decision. Plus, it makes you look incompetent.
In addition to that, your customers want consistent answers to the same question on Facebook as they get through email. Some customer may even deliberately ask the same questions on multiple channels just to be sure the answers are consistent.
But there’s a problem…
A vast majority of the customer service teams are divided into segments with little or no information sharing. This results in inefficiency and breeds confusion among team members and customers.
Therefore, ensure that all customer service staffs have a central knowledge base that is updated regularly. Create self-service platforms that provide consistent answers across different channels.
This will ease the load on your staff while giving consistent responses to customers.
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Be Empathetic
In a world of flying machines and intelligent robots, empathy is a shrinking commodity.
And because customers are humans, empathy is crucial to building trust.
Customers want to interact with another human being. They want to be treated as humans. They need that human emotional connection in order to form a bond with your brand.
Therefore, showing empathy will go a long way in your quest to instil trust for your company.
Train your customer service team to show concern and care to your customers. They should demonstrate an understanding of your customers’ pain and respond accordingly.
While this may be difficult with channels like email and chats, you can employ AI-based text analysis. This will help you analyse text and extract the emotion in it. And also aid your staffs provide an appropriate answer.
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Listen And Take Action
Trust is also a product of knowledge.
The more you know a person, the better you can understand their desires. And the better the understanding you have and actions you take in line with their desires, the more they will trust you.
Therefore, if you want your customers to trust your brand, understand what they want and give it to them. And the best way to do this is to listen to them.
Many customers feel unheard. They feel like brands do not listen to their questions and therefore misunderstand what they want.
With that in mind, you may want to train your customer service team to pay close attention customer requests. As well as having the autonomy and tools to gather information that will help resolve issues.
Another problem is brands not taking action after listening to customers. This most times happens because customer service team do not have the freedom to take action on their own.
As mentioned earlier, you should give your agents some autonomy to act on information without having to wait for permission.
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Have A Progressive Mind-set
Human needs are insatiable. Today’s desire will be tomorrow’s disgust.
Therefore, to remain relevant, you must be willing to evolve. To grow. To progress with the changing needs of your customers.
Because customers are more demanding today than they have ever been, only brands that are progressive will survive.
And so, to keep up with this increasing demand, you need to keep learning about your customers. You could employ AI to help analyse large customer data and reveal insights.
But do not forget that your customer service is a key part of this process. Teach them to embody the mind-set of continuous improvement and to seek ways to match current customer expectation.
Finally…
These 5 points will help you build trust using your customer service. The great thing about them is that they are easy to implement, and inexpensive, too.
But speaking of knowing your customers…
You can integrate a Wi-Fi analytics & marketing software to your Wi-Fi system to help you collect customer data.
Our software gives you the ability to garner valuable insights on your customers on autopilot. In turn, the data allows you to learn more about what your customers want.
With that in mind, you can then send more personalized messages to your customers that meet their exact needs. Hence, improving your marketing results.
Want to know more about how our Spoton Wi-Fi can help boost your revenue? Get I touch with us via our contact page and let’s get you started.
POSTED ON February 19, 2020Share:
