Your customer effort score (CES) should be one of your main priorities as a business. CES is calculated through simple questions, asking the customer how easy their online transaction with a business was and if they were pleased.
Gaining a good CES isn’t only about lifting your business’s spirit and making you feel good. A positive customer experience, driven by your customer service, leads to great feedback. You can use these positive reviews as a marketing tool to strengthen your direct to consumer brand. After all, satisfied customers are essential to your success.
There is nobody a customer trusts more than another customer, so if a prospective new purchaser can see that others gained from their experience with your business, they are more likely to check it out.
And of course, an excellent CES boosts the chances of a customer coming back to your company, making improving your CES a great customer retention strategy!
Source: Gartner
Ready to learn how to improve your customer effort score and how to encourage customer retention? Below, we explain seven ways to do just that.
1. Have an easily accessible FAQs page
Consider the navigation of your company website. You probably look at it every day at work, so you know it inside out. But someone visiting for the first time will likely feel a bit lost. It’s unknown territory.
That’s why it’s important that a potential customer can easily find your FAQs page from your home or about page (or both!).
In the digital world, we’ve become accustomed to everything being instant and at our fingertips, so if a customer cannot find the information they’re looking for straight away, they’ll search for it elsewhere. This means defecting to a rival business.
Keep a note of the questions that often pop up in sales emails or that you tend to be asked over the phone. These are obviously some of the key concerns or difficulties your customers come across when dealing with your service.
Having a place where all these questions are answered immediately frees up your VoIP phone (or phones, depending on your size), so your customer service agents are more readily available.
Source: ExcelConsultant
2. Organize your FAQs page
If you provide multiple services or have a somewhat complicated transaction process,which navigates the multiple ins-and-outs like utilizing a pick pack ship process, it’s possible you have an almost infinite amount of frequently asked questions.
You don’t want to bombard potential customers with lots of information they don’t want, so if it’s necessary, split your FAQs page into separate sections (think ‘postage’, ‘returns’ etc.).
It’s best to keep answers short and sweet, but we know this isn’t always possible. If your answers are so long that they use up an entire phone screen, you’ll lose people, especially if they weren’t even seeking the answer to that particular question.
Consider implementing drop-down arrows on your FAQs page. These are useful for two reasons. Firstly, they give customers the option to only view the information they’re interested in and avoid them having to scroll themselves into boredom.
Secondly, it makes your business look like it knows what it’s doing. Your FAQs are neatly organized, which means your answers will be good too!
3. Pretend to be a customer and visit your website
Customers won’t always tell you everything they struggled with. Some things you have to find out alone.
To do this, enter your website and pretend you are a new customer trying to navigate the site and complete a transaction.
Go to your FAQs page (note how easy it was to find!) and read the answers as if that were the answer you were wanting. What would your next move be now you’re confident this is the company for you? Link your customer to the page they’ll need next.
Maybe one time you were researching VoIP companies to find the right fit for your business. Did they win you over with an answer to a frequently asked question? That’s because they imagined being you.
If you fancy delving deeper into the reasons you’re not retaining customers, you can develop recordings to show customers navigating your site or help them understand your sales channel strategy. This way, you can see what areas make them pause and leave.
4. Write questions from the customer’s perspective
Writing the questions from your customer’s point of view and the answers from the business’s perspective makes the FAQs page feel like a real-life conversation. This friendly dialogue will appeal to customers who feel you’re building a relationship with them. It also shows that you’ve put yourself in the customer’s position.
Work out the buyer persona of your average client base. Do they tend to be quirky, young professionals? Or are they older and more conservative in their manner? Imitate their voice so they feel close to you.
Source: Tattly
Tattly’s FAQs page has a general questions section with drop-down arrows, and the questions are written in the perfect tone for their company’s buyer persona.
The second question, ‘how long do Tattly last,’ also seems like the sort of question a curious potential customer would begin their Google search with.
Consider writing the questions in the format a potential customer would use in a search engine query. This way, you’re improving your SEO too.
You can receive feedback in this way as well. Create a business poll that doesn’t consist of robotic-sounding questions by using the right tone. Customers will feel more inclined to participate this way.
5. Advertise your contact information well
Realistically, not every question a customer has will be a common one. But to make sure they don’t conclude that your company isn’t for them after exhausting your FAQs, have your contact information on there too.
Customers like to have a range of options for how to get in touch with you. Some will prefer to call, others like to email, and live chat is becoming popular too. If you offer the latter, make sure it is desktop- and mobile-accessible. Provide as many choices as you can to appeal to the most potential customers possible.
Not having all the answers readily prepared is more likely to be a problem for smaller businesses, so make sure you’ve got the right business telephone service to fit your needs and demands.
6. Promote your FAQs as part of the customer journey
Generally, if somebody has visited your FAQs page, it’s because they are looking for a solution to a problem. So make sure you actually offer it up.
If the question is about your inventory, link to the page on pipeline inventory in your answer. Allowing customers to get this kind of visibility can earn their trust. Transparency is one of the many ways to improve customer trust and overall conversions.
On individual pages for the products or services you offer, link to your FAQs when relevant. Adding links to your FAQs site-wide ensures customers will read the necessary information before automatically going to ring up your customer service team.
The sales team of any business is the department that keeps things running smoothly. However, they are often the colleagues on the receiving end of the most abuse. No matter how good your sales software is, you should always try and make their lives as easy as possible.
7. Consider customers post-purchase
Getting a customer to complete a transaction with your business is one task; keeping them satisfied and wanting more is another.
Customers have many concerns about online purchases. If they don’t receive a confirmation email within five seconds, they will panic that they’ve been scammed out of their money. There’s tons of email marketing services available that utilize automation and other technology to make this easier for you.
The growing popularity of using a fax service online without the need for a fax machine can help. Receipts, warranties, and return policies can be faxed to online customers and clients to give them peace of mind. A paper trail often reassures people.
When a customer purchased a product from you, they may not have considered the possibility of wanting to return the product or exchange it. Advertising your FAQs to previous customers is pivotal too.
In your confirmation email, or a follow-up email asking how their purchase was, contain links to your exchange and return FAQs. This reassures the customer you are happy to offer these, meaning they’re less likely to be difficult with your customer service team and will have fond memories of your business.
Conclusion
Attracting and retaining customers can feel like a complex endeavor for solo entrepreneurs and large businesses alike, but if you follow even some of the above steps, your CES and customer retention numbers should soon increase.
Although lots of effort can be put into taking the weight off the sales teams’ shoulders, there will always be times when they, and other departments, face difficulties. Investing in the best software to keep all sectors of your business in the loop is the final bit of advice we can give you.
Depending on your size and ambitions, a different software might be better for you than this default option. Why not check out their FAQs to find the best fit for you?