Profit is essential for continued business growth and prosperity. You worked hard to get where you are now and it’s time to enjoy the fruits of your labor. To get the final results you want, we suggest you to start with enhancing or creating a strong customer service department early in your company’s existence. The chances to convert your visitors into buyers or to reach an optimal customer retention rate are significantly reduced if your customer service isn’t top-notch!
Great support is a foundational pillar for all your marketing efforts. If your response rate isn’t at a satisfactory level, you risk losing many customers increasing your acquisition cost! In today’s IoT world, bad word-of-mouth tends to spread like wildfire! One dissatisfied customer can tell 10 others, making it imperative that your customer support agents respond quickly!
Industry leaders have recognized the importance of efficient customer service and started looking for the best solutions on the market! And they are completely right! According to the latest study, customers wouldn’t mind spending an extra 17% on companies that provide excellent customer service. Would you like to get that extra cash?
Check how the following top customer service companies earned that label!
1. Virgin Atlantic Airlines - Customers Can’t Be Bad
The golden rule of great customer service is “A Customer is Never Wrong”. The company Virgin Atlantic Airlines goes one step further by focusing on the unsatisfied customers’ inquiries.
They say that having a customer complaint is an exquisite opportunity to turn your loss into your victory. For them, it opens a door to building the strongest customer relationships. When Virgin’s customer support agents talk to a customer with an issue, they try to empathize as much as possible while addressing their problem.
The next step is to involve that same person in the solution process. In that way, a customer can develop a more personal relationship with a brand. Don’t hesitate to continue involving the customer in some service opinion actions or even reward them with some discount or an extra coupon! When you show them how much you appreciate their cooperation, they will certainly change their opinion about your service for the better!
2. Starbucks — Focus on Setting Customer Service Standards
Everyone knows about Starbucks. But have you ever asked yourself why? Yes, they have a good product, but they also have built one of the strongest brands in the world! How did they do that?
One of their most powerful marketing tools are their exceptional customer service standards. Their staff is not just trained to be kind, they are also prepared to deliver the same customer service each time they receive an order.
A caramel macchiato will always look the same! They strongly believe in creating a bond with their frequent customers by learning what they like and their name. There is no better tool to upscale your offer in customer’s eyes than to repeat the extraordinary service each time. And that is how you build a profitable standard.
3. JetBlue - Reward old customers with small gestures
One day, James Brown couldn’t get his favorite Starbucks coffee because he was boarding from a smaller JetBlue terminal at Boston’s Logan airport. As his dissatisfaction kept growing he decided to tweet about it.
One bad tweet can cost you millions, especially if you are an airline. Luckily, JetBlue has an extremely responsive customer service team that reacted right away. Not did they address the problem publicly by commenting on Twitter, they also sent the desired Starbucks coffee to wait for James on the plane.
Just think, one small gesture such as coffee that cost just a couple of dollars can make your frequent customer happy. James will come back after this for sure. However, you also saved yourself from a public shame from future comments on James’s tweet, or in the worst case with retweets.
What you can learn from JetBlue is that a fast reaction is crucial and that you should aim at solving your customer’s issue in the best way possible. And the big reward will surely come!
4. Safelite Autoglass — Customer Service is a Team Sport
Safelite Autoglass is the best customer service experience example in terms of learning from customer feedback. This approach helped them discover that their customers value their services more if they have information on where a technician is at the moment, if they are in the neighborhood, and exactly when they will arrive at their property.
This discovery fueled the business engine and the company set a goal to develop an app that will enable technicians to share their live locations. That resulted in improved customer service and higher revenue!
5. Tesla - Meet your customers where they're at
The next customer service experience example is simply jaw-dropping. Tesla not only aims at providing the highest quality cars, this company also provides assistance to their customers at any time and anywhere.
Following that goal, the company developed onsite car repair. If you need to replace a tire on your Tesla, don’t worry, you just need to contact them and a professional mechanic will arrive to replace it within a day! What other company does this?! That is a question that one Tesla’s happy customer asked on Twitter. Also, please check how many retweets this post has!
Although it is not always possible nor there is always a need to meet your customers physically, you can learn from Tesla to always try to be there for your customers. Today there are omnichannel customer support solutions, such as Helpy, where your customers can contact you 24/7. Sounds great, right?
6. Adobe - React to customer service complaints before they even happen
Three years back, Adobe faced an outage due to certain issues with Amazon Web Services. When a problem like this occurs, you can expect a stampede of customer complaints. Adobe’s customer service team played it very smart and posted a stampede of cute puppies instead!
Precisely, they tweeted about the outage and warned customers about further issues. Moreover, the company apologized to their customers, which they appreciated the most.
Their tweet formula consisted of informative text, and also of a video with cute puppies. After some time, people were talking more about how cute the puppies are than about the actual problem. You might agree that this was an incredibly smart move.
7. Trader Joe's - Show generosity
One winter, an 89-year-old man got stuck in his house due to a massive snowstorm. His grand daughter was worried if he will have something to eat. This led her to start asking all of the grocery stores in the area if they would deliver a package to her grandpa.
Luckily, Trader Joe’s offered to help her. They said that they don’t have a delivery service but that they will make an exception. After she made an order, they delivered everything from her list in 30 minutes, for free!
The grand daughter was very thankful and decided to share her story on social media. And guess what happened next?! The story went viral and Trader Joe’s was an absolute hero! The key takeaway from this story is to never be impolite or reject helping customers in need. You will for sure get the best word-of-mouth!
8. Coca-Cola - Get involved in social causes
Coke has been a global leader of charitable actions for so long! Since 1984, Coca-Cola has donated $1 billion to various causes such as supporting education, diversity, and inclusion worldwide. They give back on the local level, too. For instance, Coke Ireland has its own “Thank You Fund” that gives €100K to multiple local charities annually.
9. Zappos - Reply to every email
When a customer sends you an email, that means that they invested some time in discussing an issue related to your company. Thus, they expect an answer. Sometimes they will even try to contact the CEO, such as in the case with Zappos’s CEO Tony Hsieh. Due to his work obligations, he couldn’t reply.
However, he established a professional customer support team and one of his representatives solved this problem efficiently. She did a great job explaining why Tony couldn’t answer back while being funny, too!
