Quality customer service is the foundation of any business that wants to be successful. Technology such as e-commerce has given consumers access to more choice than ever before. So today, it’s absolutely essential to focus on providing excellent customer service.

If this isn’t a priority for your business you are at major risk of losing your clients to competitors who do prioritize customer satisfaction.

The meaning of customer service has changed over past years from one-on-one interactions in person or on the phone to include social media and other online approaches in front of a much larger audience. If you want to boost your customer service and therefore improve your sales, follow these tips to be more successful.

1. Understand your mission

What is the purpose of your business, and why does your product or service matter to your clients? It’s important to stop and think about this before even trying to modernize your customer service approach. Once you have discovered your mission, break it down into long- and short-term goals. These will help you measure your progress, so you can track the results and improve accordingly.

2. Seek feedback

Getting customer feedback is absolutely crucial to improve not just your customer service, but also your business as a whole. Find new ways to get feedback from your clients, such as sending surveys to them by email or text.

3. Stay ahead of responses

Social media is extremely quick and it’s easy to use for just about anyone. Customers are also using these platforms to discuss their experience with a company, positive or negative, which is visible to their whole following. These customers typically expect a response within hours, so it’s helpful for brands to connect with them by responding to all types of feedback quickly on whatever platform their customers are using.

4. Cross-sell

You can increase your sales easily without running a whole new marketing campaign by making sure that your sales representatives are using every possible opportunity to cross-sell. Cross-selling is when you offer an additional product or service on top of those the client is currently considering, especially when they’re related. For example, if someone is trying to purchase a backpack, you could offer a rain cover to go along with it on their outdoor activity.

The more items you can add on to the initial purchase, the more sales you’ll get. This is a hugely important skill to teach sales reps and customer service agents because it’s a proven way to boost your sales and leave customers more satisfied.

5. Offer value-add services

Customer service representatives don’t only respond to issues and help clients. They should also be offering knowledge and information about the brand and services. Sharing knowledge is a great way to give your customers some value and be foremost in their mind when they need advice or information. Your social media platforms are the perfect tools to provide information to all your clients.

6. Create a referral program

It’s a good idea to create a referral program by offering incentives. People love free things, so the best way to make sure you’ll get lots of quality referrals is to ask your client to refer your company to their community in return for some form of incentive. Studies show that those who are referred to a company by existing customers are 18% more likely to remain loyal customers.

7. Train your representatives

Your customer service team is the heart of the operation, so you need to make sure they’re well trained on all of the above. Customer service representatives are often the only interaction point a client will have with a company; they’re truly the face of the business. When they’re trained properly, and empowered to make decisions to support client satisfaction, they will be your most valuable tool for your brand identity and products.

8. Be responsible

If you’re the head of the company, you’re ultimately responsible for everything that happens. You give support and direction to the team, so if you want a strong customer service team that will go above and beyond. You need to be a leader that takes the blame when things don’t go well and gives credit to others when things go right.

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The first level of differentiation between customers is whether the potential buyer is another business, a consumer or both.

For business (or B2B) customers, research on the economic development level of a country will indicate some of the challenges these customers face, such as availability of technology, labour force skills and costs, energy costs and availability of supplies.

A study of local competitors can reveal the features of competitors’ products and services (including pre-sale, post-sale and repairs) and the challenges for which they have not yet provided solutions to the target market.

Research about a business audience can be used to create a business profile that summarizes its key characteristics. A business profile typically includes information such as demographics, location, estimated demand, purchasing decision makers, industry status and players, and unresolved problems or challenges.

Information included in a customer profile focused on consumers (or B2C) is described below.

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Understanding your customers through customer profiles

Customer profiles are used for product and service adaptations and other marketing decisions. Profiles are also often created for specific segments for the market. Customer profiles are almost certain to be diverse within every foreign market, taking into account income levels, culture, living standards, fashion, religion, politics and general attitudes toward imported products. Important aspects of the customer profile are summarized below:

Demographic Portrait

This part of the profile demonstrates a detailed understanding of the organization’s customers and typically includes demographic characteristics such as age, gender, career or job, income, level of educational attainment, geographic location and language(s) spoken.

Estimated Demand

Marketers estimate demand for products and services, and the rate at which the demand is expected to grow.

Purchase Motivation

It is important to understand what motivates customers to buy. Are they looking for savings or a way to simplify their lives? Perhaps they are seeking attention or safety. Why will customers choose the company’s product or service over the competition? Are they too inexpensive or too costly? Do they offer something unique? What cultural factors influence the values, preferences and behaviours in this target market?

In the digital age, the profile may also include a description of the customer journey from when they were first introduced to the brand or a product/service through them becoming a loyal customer.

Identifying the needs and preferences of customers

Information about customers is collected and analyzed on an ongoing basis to make decisions about developing, adapting or eliminating products.

The prevalence of online activity has created a need and an opportunity for marketers to capture or harvest information about the target market and customers using digital monitoring. This involves capturing mentions of an organization’s brand or other related topics such as products, services, promotions and even competitors. Social media can be tracked, along with other digital media such as blogs, news sites and forums.

Once all data has been captured, it must then be analyzed, and insights about market segments must be identified from it.

Feedback about products and services can come from sources other than the Internet. For example, foreign agents and other local representatives may ask for product modifications to please their customers. An organization can also routinely ask customers for their opinions through online surveys and customer advisory boards. The organization’s sales team should provide feedback from current and potential customers that is obtained through sales calls. Finally, organizations consider data from behavioural research when developing or adapting products and services.

When conducting customer preference research, a three-stage process can be used:

• Find out what problems or challenges customers are dealing with.
• Design or adapt a product or service so that it will solve the problem and address the challenges.
• Test the product or service with customers and ask for their feedback.

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Organizations collect information about end-users for the purpose of improving market segmentation or tracking sales to determine the viability of each target market. Many organizations focus their research on the customer’s journey and interactions with the organization to identify where they can improve customer satisfaction.

With an eye to the future, exporters maintain detailed sales records to better understand customers and their preferences and to gain leverage for future sales.

How do I decide what marketing metrics to measure?

With so much customer information available online, marketing experts are cautioning companies to track everything but to analyze and report only what is important and relevant. If marketers realize later that other information is important, they can go back into the data logs to retrieve the stored information.

How do organizations decide which metrics are important? They refer to sales and marketing objectives and the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) developed as part of the sales and marketing plan.

The selected KPIs should be quantifiable, and should guide sales and marketing decisions such as response time for customer support, customer experience ratings and percentage of problems resolved with one telephone call or email.

Other KPIs that are tracked might include customer loyalty before and after customers lodge a complaint, number of units sold per market segment, or sales per location.

Using digital analytics to uncover the numbers you need

Customer feedback and information about customer and product activity have long been collected through comment cards, surveys, interviews and focus groups. Sales representatives and customer service representatives also collect customer information. They make note of referral sources, customer requests and reasons that customers return products.

As a benefit of their direct contact with customers, they can gather information about customer interests and demographics, providing data that helps reach customers with the right message through the right channel.

Increasingly, research methods are being moved into digital formats. For example, whether customers bought their products in a store or online, the seller is likely to ask them to fill out a brief online survey about their buying experience.

Another influence of digitalization is the fact that information can now be collected and analyzed instantly by analytics programs. These analytics programs are commonly used by online businesses such as social platforms, e-commerce and software as a service (SaaS). These programs can collect and analyze data instantly and help organizations understand their customers and website visitors from a variety of perspectives. The types of information that analytics programs can detect include:

Behaviour: This type of data collection and analysis reveals whether visitors are new or recurring, how frequently they visit the website, the date of their last visit, and their level of engagement. Level of engagement is important because engagement leads to sales and loyal customers. Engagement is measured by metrics such as length of stay, number of pages visited and actions such as registering for the organization’s newsletter or posting a comment.

Technology: These analytics look at the types of technology visitors are using, such as browser type, operating system, resolution and type of device used to access the organization’s website. This data is used to understand how well the website works for visitors.

Demographics: An example of demographic information that analytics programs are able to detect is the language settings of users. If the organization has a sizable visitor base that uses a different language setting, it may want to expand the languages the website is available in or at the very least, add an automated translation tool to it.

What can I do with my marketing metrics once I’ve gathered data?

Digital analytics has greatly increased the capacity of information gathering, storage and analysis. The names and functions offered by programs can be confusing and can be challenging to integrate with existing data collection and storage programs. Programs with the capacity to collect online information about customers might be referred to as customer analytics programs, enterprise feedback management programs, customer relationship management programs or others.

One function to look for is enterprise-wide data management. This allows the provision of real-time data streams about the customer experience from social, mobile, local and commercial sources, such as passive geo-location data. This customer experience data is then combined with other data, analyzed and presented to employees across all functions of the organization. Another desired function is survey software that facilitates data collection, authoring, statistical analysis and reporting. Ideally such systems allow all departments to author surveys and reports, provide input into them or access them for information.

The ability to manage customer relationship data about leads, sales, existing customers and marketing campaigns is essential.

Programs that provide customer relationship management often have the ability to manage contacts, forecast sales, automate workflow and facilitate collaboration. They can also be used to create quotes and track sales deals.

Two key benefits of digital analytics platforms include the ability to integrate programs, and allowing organizations to take immediate action to improve customer experiences. This allows international trade practitioners to take advantage of the widely held belief that upset customers whose problems are addressed quickly and adeptly can be transformed into loyal customers.

The final analysis is crucial to your future decisions

The data collected by customer feedback and digital analytics informs the organization’s market segmentation decisions, the content of customer profiles, the need for adaptation of products and services, and sales and marketing strategies.

Tracking product and service activity reveals who the end-users are versus who the organization thought they would be. This information feeds into market segmentation decisions. If the target market is too broadly defined, customer needs and values will be too different and perhaps even contradictory. Customer feedback and product activity will help better define market segments. It is important to track product sales as this data indicates the viability of selling specific products or services in the target market.

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