Asking the right questions is as important as providing quick customer service, to earn customer loyalty. The journey to providing great customer experience starts with a few questions, some asked by the customer and some by the brand. These questions are especially effective towards bettering the customer experience touchpoints and starting a process towards providing memorable customer service every time.
My experience with social customer experience tells, that a lot of times when a customer complains about a certain dysfunction in a product, neither the customer nor the service agent assigned understand what the actual problem is. Clearly, because the customer hasn’t explained enough, and the agent hasn’t taken the pain to understand the problem to provide an appropriate solution. This results in unresolved queries, broken relationships and multiple escalations. To make this process transparent and restore a customer’s faith in your products/services, here’s what you should be asking your customers:
- Can you help me understand your concern better?
A customer who really wants to get their issues resolved will take time to explain what he/she is facing a problem with and provide details about their concern. This however, should be done carefully, making sure the customer has not already provided the details before. This can be easily sorted by adopting technology, like Simplify360, which keeps records of customer complaints from the past and details of conversation between different agents and the customer.
Confusions of the like are bound to happen considering the change in shifts of agents, auto assignment rules of CX tools and more.
Drawing an example from my personal experience, both Amazon and Uber follow a similar route to providing customer service. I complained about my certain(different) issues to both the brands. During my third interaction with Amazon, I was received by a well-informed agent, who already had my history of conversation with other agents, providing me an effortless service after. On the other hand, every time I was received by a different agent for Uber, I was requested to provide the same information repeatedly, leaving me irritated and not willing to opt for their service any longer.
Clearly, I did not hesitate to provide all the required information around my problem during my first interaction with both the brands. But a lack of coordination has led to the loss of a loyal customer forever for Uber, while Amazon successfully restored my faith in the brand.
- How can we make up for the trouble we have caused you?
As a customer, I would want a brand to compensate for a mistake they have made. Not many brands are doing it already, but asking the customer how they would want to be compensated is a great way to rekindle a seemingly lost relationship. Of course, there will be customers who expect way above what you are willing to compensate but an effort never hurts.
Most brands provide partial or complete refunds (especially seen among food delivery apps), while others provide vouchers or coupons which are applicable on the next purchase. These are easy and effective ways to achieve customer success via customer service.
- Have I solved your problem?
It is important to understand whether your customer’s query has been completely resolved or he/she needs further assistance. Closing cases only to reopen the same again leaves a bad impression on the customer’s mind and more often than not leads to increased negativity on your social pages. What’s the best way to do this? Just ask if there is anything else that the customer needs from you.
- Rate us on a scale?
The best way to know whether you have provided a satisfactory service to your customer is by asking them to rate their experience on a scale of one to five. This will help you as a brand to understand the kind of conversations which work better at solving customer issues vs the ones which require mending.
Practicing this, also helps identify problem areas which require senior intervention and support compared to ones which can be easily solved, helping you increase positivity.
- Would you recommend us?
Satisfactory customer service always resonates to increased purchases and higher recommendation rates. If you have successfully resolved a customer query and ensured your customer leaves happy after a long chat session, you have already confirmed one returning customer. Asking them whether they would recommend you, is another way to calculate how your sales funnel might grow in the future. Higher the recommendation rate, better will be your ROI, both for customer service and marketing.
In addition to this, if you also provide with an amazing offer, such as recommend your friends and win cashback on every purchase they make, it might work wonders to your sales figures. This module has been beautifully executed by Goibibo.
Apart from the above, you could also subtly ask your customers questions related to “do they prefer you over competing brands?”, “what intrigued them to make a purchase from you?”, “where did they find out about you?” or “are they happy with your product/service and if you need to make any improvements?”