5 Tips for Award-Winning Customer Service

Customer satisfaction has an enormous impact on the success of your business. Delivering award-winning customer service can win you happy customers for life – so it’s important to get customer service right. 

To help you take your customer service to the next level, we’ve put together these 5 tips for award-winning customer service. 

There is absolutely nothing worse than slow customer service. Whether you’re at a coffee shop or in minute 43 of a call with technical support, waiting is truly the worst.

Stop making your customers wait so long.

Award-winning customer service starts as soon as the customer logs a ticket. From there, they should immediately receive a “thank you for contacting customer service email.” This email may seem overly formalised, but it’s important for two reasons:

1. It lets the customer know you have received their message and are working on a response.
2. It gives the customer an expectation of when they will be contacted.

Of course, you don’t work 24/7 – which is why business hours are important. We recommend making your business hours noticeable in several places. That includes:

• In the header or footer of your website.
• In your initial “thank you for contacting customer service” email.
• In your phone’s greeting message.

One study from SuperOffice even reports that 41% of customers surveyed listed being put on hold as their biggest source of frustration. To us, this suggests that the worst part of waiting isn’t actually, but not knowing what will happen next.

What does this mean?

The trick to providing fast customer service is to ensure your customers are always aware when they will hear from you next.

To keep your team motivated, set yourselves a goal of contacting every customer within 1 business day of their message being logged.

Of course, that brings us to our next tip.

Award-winning customer service isn’t the responsibility of any individual employee. Instead, good customer service is cultivated by the hard work of a team working towards a singular goal.

As a software company looking to the future, we believe the days of sticking a poster saying “responsibility” and calling it a ‘customer service value’ are over.

Instead, here’s how you set goals that get you award-winning customer service.

First, you need to choose values that are in-line with your business. Here are some values you’re probably familiar with:

• Loyal
• Accountable
• Respect
• Committed
• Innovative
• Thankful

Secondly, you need to make that goal specific to your organisation. Instead of just having “loyal” as your value, define who or what you are loyal to. Here are some examples to get you thinking:

• Loyal to customers.

• Accountable for ourselves.
• Respectful of different opinions.
• Committed to delivering high-quality services.
• Innovative in our approach.
• Thankful for customer feedback.

Lastly, your team needs to take ownership of that value by making it actionable in a day-to-day setting. Try turning your value into a full sentence like “we are committed to delivering high-quality bookmaking services”.

Just like that, you’ve got an award-winning customer service value you can work towards.

Award-winning customer service is absolutely a team sport – but how do you get everyone to play?

Cultivating a strong and happy team is a pain point for managers and business owners internationally, but it doesn’t have to hurt.

Strong teams start with strong resources. Humans will always make mistakes, so instead of relying purely on brain-power, give your customer service representatives great resources.

That includes:

• Customer service training for new employees.
• Standardised practises.
• Templates to work with.

The best way to train new employees in great customer service is to combine formalised training with shadowing. During formalised training, focus on your organisation and your values. After, pair your new employee with an experienced employee to shadow.

Standardised practises are also important. Instead of relying on employees to improvise, develop organisation-wide procedures for common activities like answering policy-related questions and solving common problems.

Professional communication templates are also a game-changer. When responding to emails, give your employees a standard format to use. This saves time and makes your organisation look more cohesive and professional.

Companies with award-winning customer service always build trust with customers. How? They stick to their promises.

Customer service representatives are always making promises to customers, even if it’s as simple as a “24 call back” policy. To us, these promises are a routine part of the day, but to customers, these commitments are a personal agreement the company made.

Consider these commitments a contract, and honour them.

But what happens if you’ve made a promise you can’t honour?

Believe it or not, companies with award-winning customer service make plenty of mistakes – so how do they fix them?

No one ever expects things to go smoothly 100% of the time, which is why honesty is important. If you promised a customer something that won’t happen, you’re only setting them up for disappointment.

Instead, be honest.

You may make a customer unhappy by telling them their issue won’t be resolved for a week, but you’ll lose a customer if you promise them a 24-hour turnaround and only fix it a week later.

Customer feedback is the backbone of award-winning customer service. The days of ‘the customer is always right‘ may be over, but customers are still the lifeblood of your business.

How do you get great customer feedback? You ask for it.

The best way to get customer feedback is to send out a feedback email after the customer’s ticket is closed. This will let you track how good your customer service is using key performance indicators like:

• Average resolution time.
• Average reply time.
• Customer satisfaction score.
• Replies per resolution score.

Another great statistic to track is your net promoter score. This score is calculated by breaking down your customers into promoters, passives and detractors. This is usually presented as a percentage, like 50% promoters, 20% passives and 30% detractors.

Once you have this feedback, actually use it to build up your award-winning customer service. 

As experts in customer service, we know that great organisations need excellent software they can trust. That’s why we’re here. 

Realbookies has been dedicated to building five-star software for the past twenty years. In 2020, we’re the leading choice for PPH bookies worldwide. 

Don’t believe us? 

Try our Pay Per Head software yourself and see where our unrivaled customer service can take you.