Updated
March 15, 2024
Written by
Laniel Arive
Whether physical or online shops, customers play a vital role in keeping any business alive. If anything, they are the sole reason why businesses exist. Thus, it is essential to hold them in the loop and, if one must, make them the center of the universe.
In other words, providing outstanding customer service for business is crucial to the company’s success. Especially in the current landscape of the digital market, a brand needs to stand out. It is one thing to give your customers a worthwhile purchase but another to give them an enjoyable experience. And that is where customer service comes into play.
What is customer service?
Customer service is the support a brand offers its customers before and after purchasing. It involves answering their questions and resolving their concerns about a product or service.
However, customer service continues beyond giving answers and solutions. It also helps the company fulfill the promises it made to the customers. Not only does customer satisfaction rely on a brand’s customer service, but also does the company’s lifeline. And this alone emphasizes the importance of customer service.
As technology continues to reshape the digital landscape, the expectations of customers have evolved, too. In a nutshell, they expect business platforms to cater to them with the best customer service.
But customer service is not solely for customers. Here are three main reasons why customer service is important for online businesses:
In short, the positive effects of excellent customer service have a snowball effect. But the more important question is, what makes good customer service?
The formula for good customer service has many factors. There are the elements of promptness, respect, professionalism, clear communication, empathy, and more. And because this sounds more overwhelming than it is, we are here to provide you with the shortcut you are looking for.
The secret to exceptional customer service is to instate a customer-centric culture in your workforce.
Customer-centric culture refers to the values and business strategies that aim to keep the customers as the central point of the company’s success. In short, customer-centricity puts the customers first before anything else.
Why is this important?
As implied, customer-centric culture is the backbone of excellent customer service. Thus, it echoes the importance of customer service to both customers and the company.
Besides this, customer-centricity allows businesses to understand their customers’ needs. And when you recognize what your clients look for, it is easier to attend to them and formulate other products or services they might be interested in. Consequently, a customer-driven culture makes businesses one step ahead of their competitors. In a highly competitive digital marketplace today, having a competitive edge is a big thing.
Now, let’s delve into how you will make your business more customer-driven.
Creating a customer-centric culture is more than just putting your customers first. It sparks from somewhere deeper in the company’s workforce.
Here are some strategies to create a customer-driven culture:
The initiative to create a customer-centric culture must start from the company. Thus, it is imperative for brands to hire customer-focused employees or agents.
Customer-focused employees have the necessary customer service skills to provide customers with a quality experience with the brand. These include good communication skills (such as active listening and empathy), interpersonal skills (such as professionalism), and technical skills (such as problem-solving). With all these traits combined, employees can understand their customers’ needs and wants.
While these skills are inherent to some humans, training your employees is a crucial step, too. To maintain consistency, brands need to orient their employees and agents. They must know what the customers need–whether they want an explanation, an apology, or a solution to their problem. While providing customer service lies on the shoulders of employees, making the employees ready and able is the company’s responsibility.
Customer feedback is helpful to companies at all costs. It allows customers to voice their opinions about the brand and informs the company of what to improve. Thus, it is essential for online businesses to always have an open and accessible customer service line.
Encouraging honest customer feedback doesn't just end at telling them. A big part of it is making it easier for your customers to contact you. Hence, business platforms must provide channels where customers can place their reviews and concerns.
Remember, customer-centricity means prioritizing your customers. Thus, it is important to make them feel heard and valued by actively listening and responding to their feedback.
However, it is essential to note that companies need to be honest with the feedback they are receiving. While positive reviews are ideal, negative criticisms must not be taken down because they show the company's authenticity and transparency. Instead, these need to be addressed through making business adjustments or communicating with the customers with their concerns.
Customer-centricity is not a one-time thing. Just like any other culture we know, it only flourishes when practiced. Thus, online brands must consistently make customer-centered efforts to uphold a customer-centric culture.
But how can companies do that?
By setting clear customer service standards, online businesses will have guiding principles on how to accommodate and attend to customers’ needs and expectations. These standards often include responsiveness, promptness, transparency, omnipresence, and more. Establishing these also helps the company measure its customer service performance, which is important in ensuring that customers consistently get what they deserve.
Customer-centric culture is a great differentiator in the competitive landscape of the digital market today. And regardless of which industry, the businesses that realize it sooner have the upper hand over others.
Here are some ways how companies instrumentalized customer-centricity to their success:
Among many coffee chains in the food and beverage industry, Starbucks’ ability to make its brand unique and customer-centric has made it stand out.
The giant coffee business has become a global brand by tailoring unique customer experiences. Not only do they offer new products on their menu from time to time, but they also personalize beverages and implement reward programs for their customers. They also have a mobile ordering platform that provides customers with various recommendations based on their previous orders and preferences.
In the technology industry, Apple has become one of the leading brands, all thanks to its customer-driven marketing efforts. From product designs and services to retail experiences, the brand has consistently prioritized its existing and interested customers. In 2023, they offered Apple Pay Later, which enabled customers to pay for their purchases over a period of time with no additional fees and through an easier process.
In the vast online shopping world, Amazon is among the prominent embodiments of customer-centric businesses today. Through its customer obsession principle, the company has established itself as the go-to shopping platform where customers experience personalized product recommendations and one-click ordering. All these indicators of good customer experience were powered by the company’s investment in innovative technology.
In short, Amazon makes its customers feel understood and valued by providing the most up-to-date innovation to increase the quality of their experiences.
As mere spectators, it is easier to assess the success of customer-centric culture by seeing how big companies have been bigger over time. However, in the case of smaller businesses, how do we gauge the success of customer-centricity?
By implementing customer satisfaction surveys, the company can gauge how much the customer enjoys, prefers, or even dislikes a particular product or service. Although this is often regarded as a basic survey, customer satisfaction surveys allow the company to understand the customers' needs and expectations as well as recognize the opportunities for improvement.
Customer retention rate measures the percentage of customers that stay in the company within a specific period. This number translates to the level of loyalty of the existing customers and the success of the customer-focused efforts of the brand.
Referral rates measure the level or percentage of a company’s profit from referrals. Referral refers to the customers who were referred to your brand through someone else. It often occurs when customers are satisfied with a product or service, and they recommend it to others through casual conversations or social media postings. In short, high referral rates indicate a successful customer-centric culture because it results in satisfactory customer service.
Although it sounds simple, establishing a customer-centric culture is not without challenges that companies need to overcome.
Customer-centricity requires the company’s willingness and capacity to change. Thus, anything that resists this change, regardless of whether deliberate or not, is a problem that needs fixing. Some of the factors that drive the resistance to change include the employees’ comfort with the status quo and the lack of skills or resources to embrace technological innovations.
Besides this, another challenge in creating a customer-focused business is low employee engagement. When the company's workforce is siloed and the employees' commitment is inadequate, attaining customer-centricity will remain only a goal.
Take note, ensuring exceptional customer service is the responsibility of all the people living under the roof of the company.
However, the more important question is, how do we overcome these challenges?
Remember, there is nothing a good communication cannot do. To alleviate the company members’ resistance to change, business leaders need to orient their employees to the company’s long-term vision. They need to emphasize how crucial the customer-centric culture is in achieving this vision.
Because businesses rely on its customers, enforcing marketing strategies that aim to better customer service is an urgent matter.
Creating a customer-centric culture means redesigning your business from the customer’s perspective. While it is easily identifiable that it pertains to the customer’s needs and expectations, it is as important to keep your employees in the loop. That way, they would effectively offer the customer service tailored to your target audience.
With the tips mentioned above, it is easier for companies to draw the fate of their customer-centric business. But when all else fails, companies must not fret because there is always another solution to a problem.
In the case it is difficult to embrace the arduous task of providing outstanding customer service, companies can consider outsourcing customer service solutions.
Outsourced customer support services offer a wide array of contact center services, which aim to deliver great service to the customers. These often include multilingual customer support, email support, and voice support services.
How does it work?
Outsourced customer service support allows the company to focus on other matters while letting a group of skilled customer support providers take on the task of making their business customer-centric.
In physical stores, it is easier to give customers a satisfactory experience by attending to their needs real-time. However, in the digital space, the challenge of good customer service falls on how the company will address the growing demands of the virtual marketplace.
But why dwell on an obstacle when the solution is just a click away?
New Media Services provides exceptional contact center service which utilizes the power of human and Artificial Intelligence (AI) outsourcing solutions to boost your services and daily operations. By improving your customer support, our business customer service guarantees efficiency and customer satisfaction.Secure your key to success today. Contact us for more details!
Help us devise custom-fit solutions specifically for your business needs and objectives! We help strengthen the grey areas on your customer support and content moderation practices.
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