MBA986 4 Ways to Improve Your Customer Service Today

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Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast. It always has you and your business covered with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the hundred dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and in today's lesson you will learn four ways to improve your customer service. Today I'm going to share with you four strategies that you can implement right now that will drastically improve the level of your customer service. In my years in business, I found that customer service is the backbone of keeping your business alive. Happy customers mean return customers and it's a whole lot easier to keep a customer than to get a new one. I can tell you from our own experience with our software company Webinar Ninja, the higher our customer service rating, the lower our churn, the less customers we lose. Which means more money in your pocket. So if you want more money in your pockets, listen up because these strategies are going to help improve your customer service in a big way. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. The four strategies I'll be sharing with you today to improve your customer service can work on any size customer service team.

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So even if you're a customer service team of one, meaning you're the person who's doing all the customer service, replying to all the emails, all the messages, you could still apply this. That means if you're a customer service team of one, you could still apply this. If you're answering all the tickets yourself, you're answering all the emails, you could still apply these strategies. And of course these strategies are applicable and in some cases even more powerful if you have a team or a group of people that are doing customer service for your company, even if it's a small team of two, three, four people. Now, I hand picked with Nicole, my co founder and who really heads up customer service at Webinar Ninja, the four things that really move the needle, four things that can really change the game and really help your customer service be at another level. You want your customers to rave about your customer service. When they talk about your product, they have to mention customer service because it's so good. And that's when we knew we were doing a good job with customer service. When every time they gave a review or, or we asked them for feedback, they mentioned the great experience they had with customer service. So let's get into the first strategy you can do right now to improve your customer service. Number one is response time. I should clarify and say first response time. So when a customer sends in an email or a customer service ticket of some sort, when I say ticket, I mean, you know, like a Zendesk ticket if you're using software for customer service or Intercom or something like that. So when they send in a message, the faster you can get back to them with some answer, some reply, the better. Now obviously a lot of these systems, these softwares like Zendesk and Intercom, they have this auto reply feature where it just kind of acknowledges the fact that hey, we received your request and we'll get back to you shortly. Now that's fine and all, but I don't actually consider that the first response. I'm talking about an actual response from an actual person or agent that working on the team. So in our team we have a philosophy that first response is so important. So even if you can't answer the question right now, immediately, whether you have to ask, you know, the technical team, whether you have to do some research or go into their account to see what they're talking about, even if you just respond to them immediately and just say, hey there, thanks for writing in, I see that you're having some trouble with so and so or you have a question about so and so. I'm going to get back to you in a few minutes or I'm going to get back to you really soon. But I just wanted to check, chime in, say I'm on it. This makes a world of a difference. You're acknowledging that they have some sort of concern or question. They get a response and it makes them feel like, hey, these people are on top of things. I got a response within minutes. And even if their problem, their question is not resolved yet, they know that you're on top of it. This is especially important when somebody's writing in for the first time. The relationship starts on a positive note. They feel like, wow, this team has it together. They know what they're talking about and customer service is a priority for them. So in our customer service team, let's say for example, we have a stack of messages we have to answer, say 30, and we would go to the oldest one first, the one that's been waiting the longest, and hit them with the first response as fast as possible. And we'd go through each ticket and try to do that. Unless you can respond quickly with an easy answer, a one liner or a link to a tutorial, first response counts and it really makes a great impression. Now we use Intercom for our customer service software and we see a direct correlation between our first response time and our customer service rating. So again, the faster we get to people, the happier they are, even if that first email is just acknowledging what they're asking. All right, that's number one. Number two, I mentioned it really quick just earlier. Tutorials. Having a bank of tutorials can really help you and your customer service team tremendously. Number one, by having tutorials that, that walk people through how to use your product, your software, your service, whatever it is, it helps them self serve. So often what people like to do is offer their tutorial bank or the tutorial page before they submit a customer service ticket or email. So this helps people try to find their answer themselves, meaning that you're going to cut down on tickets because people will self serve themselves, they might find their answer quickly or they'll be able to figure out how to do something by just following a tutorial and it's your job to help have that all set up for them. Now, a lot of tools like Zendesk or Intercom have this built into their actual customer service field or their customer service form. So when they're submitting an email, they will suggest and say, hey, maybe this tutorial can help you. So before they actually Submit a ticket. They might not need to because that tutorial will answer their question for them. The other thing about tutorials that are great is that it cuts down on response time. So if I have to explain to a customer every single time how to do something in great detail of a particular feature or option, this is going to take me a long time to respond to emails or customer service tickets. It's a whole lot easier for you or the customer service agent to reference to a tutorial. So they can just pop in a link and say, hey, this tutorial will help you with this question. It's going to walk you through it. If you have any questions, let me know. And basically you're just directing them where to go to get all the information so much faster using this method. And with some software like Intercom, they'll even suggest the tutorials that you have saved in the system. So it'll automatically scan the content of the email from the customer and say, hey, maybe these tutorials can help them. So you can just click a button, literally just insert the tutorial in your response. Tutorials are great, but it does take time to constantly update them if there are things that change in your business or in your product that as well as add new ones as you start to evolve and improve your product. But they're great for self service, for customers as well as responding faster. All right, strategy number three, and this is a huge one, this is something that we do every six months or so. And basically we sit down with our customer service team. Our team is remote, so we sit down virtually on a video call and we ask them to take a day or so to write down. The top five concerns customers have are the five most common problems they have with our product or offering. What are the things that they get emails about all the time? Now this could be a feature, this could be just not clear the way the UI is user interface, maybe they're making a mistake and they're not aware of something. So the point here is that you want to ask your customer service team to tell you what are the things they keep hearing about. What are some of the things that if you can completely erase would cut down, let's say, you know, 50% of their tickets or even 20% of their tickets. So your team comes back with their top five and basically you just go to work with your development team or your project management team. Or maybe it's just you that needs to work on just improving the product. So these five things are eliminated completely. So they're not a problem ever again. And this is one of the best investments we've done in terms of helping our customer service team improve their service, because we're eliminating some of the biggest problems that they're getting or the most frequent problems. And a lot of times it's just a small fix, like a clarification, or maybe we need to do something different with onboarding to make things clear. It's just a communications thing, and sometimes it's a feature thing. Maybe we need to fix something or solve a problem or remove something that's confusing. This is a case of using innovation to cut down frustration. Right? And every six months, we do this because, again, we want to get better and better. Now, the next five things may not be so major, but it may not be a huge percentage of the problems. But you're still cutting down on any kind of tickets that are coming in that are frequent of the same nature.

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All right, number four, fourth strategy to greatly improve your customer service right now. And that's small incentives. This strategy we implemented about two years ago, and I was shocked at how well it worked. And it's simple. It's rewarding your team for a job well done. Now, you can make this reward whatever you want it to be. You want it to be an Amazon gift card, you want to make it a cash bonus, whatever. But for us, we chose to do a virtual pizza party. So how does this work? Well, we have customer service satisfaction goals. So, say, for example, our goal is to hit 95% this month. We want to make sure that 95% of all our customers are raving. Fans love us. Not an easy goal. But if we do hit it as a team by the end of the month, then we're gonna throw a virtual pizza party. So what does that mean? That means you're buying pizza and drinks for your actual team. So each team member will have pizza and a drink or drinks for them and their family. And it's really cool and fun because everybody gets to enjoy a nice little party, little pizza party. And we share pictures. And sometimes we do it online with Video, and it's a great way to pat each other on the back. And it's a lot of fun. It's a bit of an expense for a huge amount of gain. One, you are recognizing hard work. Number two, you're motivating people beyond just, you know, doing a great job. Yeah, I know it's just pizza and some drinks, but it's more than that. It's a celebration, and it's also the recognition. So any kind of incentives you can add to certain customer service goals can really help because it keeps your customer service team aware of what's going on. Hey, what's our rating right now? I gotta make sure I do a great job today because we got a few more days left in the month and we're teetering around the percentage and we got to hit that mark. Let's get that pizza party together. You get the point. I know some of you are hearing this, like, really, this makes a difference. It makes a difference. You know, I know this works because I used to be at a job and I used to do above and beyond my job all the time, and I got nothing for it. Not even a pat on the back, not even a good job. And that gets old over time. Meaning that after working hard for year after year and no one says, hey, good job, let's celebrate, you start to say, well, if they don't care, if they don't appreciate me, maybe I'm not in the right place. Maybe I shouldn't be working so hard. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, it happens. It's human nature. So recognize the fact that we all need pats on the back and incentives. All right, guys, that wraps up today's lesson. Let me just quickly recap four strategies to improve your customer service today. Number one, quick first response time. Even just recognizing the fact that, hey, this is your question, this is your concern. I'm going to get on it soon as possible. Number two, get your tutorials in order so customers can self help themselves as well as help you respond faster with quick links. Number three, top five issues that they face. Get them to report them so you can fix them and eliminate them. And number four, incentivize with some great rewards for hitting milestones. All right, that wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you loved today's episode or you loved any of our episodes, let us know in an itunes rating and review. We'd love to hear from you. We read every single review. I get so excited when I read them. It lets us know what you love about the show so we can keep on doing it. All right, that's it for me today, guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this whatever you're selling, product, service, physical business, online business, soft product, physical product, it doesn't matter. At the end of the day, it's the customer experience that matters. What the customer experiences when they transact with you, when they go through the experience of doing business with you, that's what they're going to remember. Look at the businesses that are really successful today, like Amazon. Their customer service is at the forefront of their whole business because they know that if customers have a bad experience, they're going to go elsewhere. And the same goes with your business, so make sure it's a priority. I hope you enjoyed today's strategies, but I got more strategies for you tomorrow. I got five strategies to improve your open and click rates in your marketing emails. I'll be sharing those strategies tomorrow, so make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss it, all right? Until then, take care.

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