As we’ve already mentioned, providing excellent customer service is a key part of giving people a great customer experience. Sometimes, things go wrong and when they do, customers want to know that they’re being heard and that their issues are being handled quickly and empathetically. Almost all customers agree that excellent support builds trust and makes them more likely to buy from a brand again - and 80% of people will recommend a brand based on a good customer service experience.

But, providing a consistently high level of service can be a real challenge. Customers get very frustrated when they’re put on hold, or when they’re passed from agent to agent who aren’t familiar with their issues or able to answer their questions. So, what changes can brands make to improve the customer support they offer? There are a number of channels where the customer service experience needs to be tip-top but the ones we’ll look at here are messaging services and social media.

Email, apps and dedicated messaging channels, like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, are all very popular support mechanisms. They’re fast, secure, easy to use and offer excellent conversational support, where people feel heard and understood. And, because it’s a messaging service, rather than a chatbot, customers don’t expect immediate responses - which allows support agents to do any necessary research or consult their colleagues before offering solutions.

Social media is another key place to offer support - but as a channel, it can actually go way beyond that. Social channels are key platforms for customer experience initiatives, because they’re places where people tend to speak their minds freely, offering frank comments about their experience of a brand and its products. This is very valuable data, and you can even encourage this type of feedback with contests, surveys, polls and giveaways.

A lot of customers say that their experience of a brand on social media has an impact on purchase decisions, too. So, away from the customer service side of things, social media can also really incentivize people to buy your products, with live shopping events in particular, proving very popular and effective.

So, that’s your website, chatbots, messaging apps and social media, and how all of those can be leveraged to provide customers with an exceptional experience. But, we’re not done just yet and there’s one channel we still need to quickly mention: loyalty programs.

They’re typically seen as very helpful at retaining customers, but a lot of them aren’t actually fit for purpose. Many people say the rewards offered by these kinds of programs are difficult to track and redeem, and that they’d engage with loyalty programs more if these issues were fixed. Customers also ask for rewards to be more personalized to reflect their specific needs and interests - which is something that you should be aiming for across all of your platforms and channels.

Messaging Apps & Social Media