To create an excellent customer experience, you first need to start with basic customer service. The aim of customer service should be to create a positive outcome for your customer, both during and after your interaction with them. The outcome of this interaction is the “customer experience”. To continuously meet the needs of customers, many businesses develop a customer experience management system or policy to help drive greater customer loyalty and better overall business performance.
Why focus on first-class customer experiences?
In today's landscape, there are very few developers that provide a “rare” or “hard to get” product or service. Most developers offer products and services that are very easy to reproduce. So what will make your developments stand out from the crowd is your customer service. Driving outstanding customer experiences can shine a bright spotlight on your business for current and new customers.
With many businesses, customers tend to buy from companies that have strong online ratings and reviews or those that have been recommended by family and friends. The same goes for developers and their developments. Positive customer experiences play a major role in influencing customers’ decision-making on what and where they buy from.
Your business should not “hope” that by chance you will have a good reputation through customer experiences, you should actively achieve it. Be prepared to handle the good and the bad reviews with a solid customer experience management system. Addressing customer feedback can make a huge difference to your current bottom line and the long-term sustainability of your business.
What can you do?
Every business is unique and what may work with one, may not work with another. However, creating first-class customer experiences is important for all businesses across the board.
You may want to start developing your customer experience policy with visualising yourself as a customer. Define what outstanding first-class customer service looks and feels like to you. What degree of customer service would you personally want or expect when purchasing a product or service from your business? How would you like to be spoken to? What results would you want or expect? Do you prefer interacting by phone, email, SMS, snail mail, all the above?
Generally, the most-valued factors in customer experiences are human contact and efficiency. Customers want to feel important, and so they should! It is important to make sure they feel that their message has been heard and something is in motion straight away.
Keeping this in mind, most people still prefer live phone calls with a customer service professional to resolve any issue they have. Being efficient involves solving customers’ problems as quickly as possible. Additionally, it's very important to always stay professional with a friendly tone when your employees are interacting with customers, regardless of how the customer may be communicating back. This also applies to online chat, direct email communication, and face to face communication.
On the other hand, there are also customers who prefer to help themselves when there is a problem. For these customers, you should provide up-to-date FAQs and a contact submission form on the contact us page of your website. Categorising specific questions on the contact us form can direct specific matters to employees or departments with that special knowledge base and speed up the solution-finding process, so you can get back to customers as soon as possible. This will help cultivate positive customer experiences and relationships.
When all your employees are trained to keep the quality of customer service up at the highest level and priority, a positive chain reaction will follow to your customers’ overall experience of your business. Having enthusiastic employees that offer help and communicate sincerely will also help create a first-class customer service experience. There is not much better than seeing positive reviews from your customers relating to how they were handled by your team!
Working with a robust and scalable Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a valuable tool for any business, especially when it comes to providing first-class customer service. Having a detailed log or call recording of all previous interaction with customers will ensure greater efficiency. Imagine a customer having to call back and explain their situation from scratch? I’m sure that’s happened to you and I’m sure you would have preferred that the notes were saved from your previous call! A CRM is also a great tool to create new tasks related to customer service so that multiple employees can efficiently manage any given customer matter. Escalating matters to management easily through your CRM is also an important factor to consider when developing your customer experience management system.
It's up to you!
If you see flaws in your customer service experience, do something about it. Always look for new ways to improve the experience for your customers. At the very least, think about the type of service you would expect to receive and make it happen in your business.
Developing your own unique customer service management system or policy will ensure greater customer loyalty, repeat purchases and more positive reviews for your business.
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Leor Shavel
Managing Director
Leor built his career in sales and marketing working across a range of industries in Canada and Australia. In more recent years, Leor’s passion for real estate has led him to focus on applying his sales and marketing experience to the property market with a particular emphasis on delivering superior buyer experience and minimising settlement risks for developers.