Quick Five-Minute Reads for Boosting Customer Success

Your customers, as well as your employees, should be raving brand ambassadors. You want everyone singing their praise of your product, service and selection.

Recently, I wrote about the four building blocks that set the tone and standards for ensuring a culture for exceptional customer service – service I call More Than Perfect®. Establishing business benchmarks, developing your DNA, cultivate elite experiences and a being very conscious and deliberate about your company culture are essential.

Here are few articles that reinforce this model, with insight from some stellar experts and helpful resources.

Great Advice for Exceptional Customer Service

Poor customer service might seem the polar opposite of exceptional customer service, says “Delight Your Customer” author Steve Curtin, but it’s actually indifferent customer service. Service teams see their role as simply executing a function are enemies of good service. Disconnected from job purpose, they treat “each customer like the previous customer until the end of another boring and monotonous shift.” Great service is voluntary, Curtin says, driven by service teams willing to “take initiative and expend discretionary effort in the moment of choice.”

Customer Service Fails to Avoid Using Social Media

Social media can be a great tool for customer service. But, you don’t want to be reactionary, engage in anger with customers online or ignore conversations around service issues, writes Social Media Week.  Social media is best when it’s about being transparent and open with customers so that you – not the marketplace – control your own story, cautions the website. They add, “A single error or momentary lapse in judgment can harm your brand’s image for years to come.”

Master the Right Words to Say to Customers

Communications skills are the cornerstone of exceptional customer service. Sometimes service teams can be too quick to fall into tired, ineffective clichés. The marketers at Hubspot recently updated their 9 Deadly Customer Services Phrases to Avoid infographic. When helping a customer work through a problem, you want to set expectations and define a plan of action, they suggest. Try substituting the phrase “Let me look into that..” with “I’m going to do some more research. I will call you back with a solution by 3- p.m. today.”

How to Transform Bad Reviews Into Good Customer Service

The more effort a customer puts into a review, the more personalized and specific your response should be, writes customer support software provider Help Scout in an article about a poor online review into a positive for everyone. Never copy and paste the same message, “apologize for the inconvenience,” or reference a specific complaint with a vague, generic way. “You need to go above and beyond what is expected from good customer service,” Help Scout writes, “By taking the time to resolve issues online, you show your community just how much you value every customer.”