Everyone wants happy customers. But how do we get them? Good customer experience is an art that requires both rigorous attention to detail and excellent interpersonal skills. These seven things can put you on the path to greater customer happiness and a more successful business.

Simplicity

Working with you shouldn’t be hard work.

If your processes are about making life easier for you, instead of for the customer, you’re on the wrong track. To make your customers happy, you need to do the work for them as much as possible.

  • Pare down the steps until everything left is absolutely necessary.
  • Aim for one-call resolution.
  • Don’t make them repeat their reason for calling.

Honesty

No one likes a bait-and-switch.

Deliver what you promise. Part of this is making sure you know your product well enough to recognize when a lead isn’t a good fit. If you come by your leads dishonestly or indiscriminately, not only will you struggle to convert them, but eventually your deception (or lack of follow-through) will backfire. A dissatisfied person will go to greater lengths to disparage your business than your happy customers will to cheer you. Be who you are. If you don’t like it, don’t resort to trickery—change.

Accountability

Nobody’s perfect.

Earning customer happiness is not easy. The question is, how will you handle it when things go wrong? Correcting mistakes is as much a part of providing a good customer service as doing things right the first time.

How you respond to criticism or dropped balls says a lot about your company. Some bad situations can be turned around—if you’re willing to admit your shortcomings and correct them.

Anticipation

Eat your own dog food.

No, not literally. Eating your own dog food means using your own stuff. If it doesn’t work for you, how will it work for your customers? Using what you build—whether it’s a product, service, or both—is the best way to know it inside out, which helps you make it better.

Try to predict your customer’s needs before they happen. Proactive, rather than reactive, customer service is where the real magic happens. You have to walk in your customer’s shoes—to see and feel and yes, taste, what they do.

Efficiency

When you’re waiting for something to happen, time slows to a crawl.

If your process is slow or forces people to repeat themselves—for example, because you haven’t taken the time to make sure information gathered by one part of your organization is available to other parts—you can expect some irritated customers.

The same thing applies to your technology. Is your IVR a sprawling labyrinth? Do you put people on hold only to have them get disconnected? And if your customers get a busy signal when they call you—seriously?

Not sure how to be more efficient? It starts with keeping things simple (see above).

Consistency

Do the job right the first time.

Great customer service—the kind that can earn you customer happiness—is predictable and dependable. That’s easy to say, of course, and a bit harder to execute. You can be more consistent by:

  • Standardizing answers to frequently asked questions in an online knowledgebase.
  • Keeping your staff up to date on changes. If your process changes but your people don’t know, you’re in trouble.
  • Relying on your training. The effort you put into training your employees will pay off—if you treat them well enough to make them stick around.

Empathy

People remember how you make them feel.

So says Maya Angelou, and she’s right. It’s possible to get your needs met while still feeling frustrated with the experience. Part of achieving empathetic service is to encourage your staff to be people, not robots.

Of course, you want to provide scripts, guidelines, and best practices. But beyond that, empowering your staff to think on their feet and adjust their reactions to the situation at hand will lead to the best possible customer service.

What’s Your Take?

Customer happiness is a deep subject, because it’s all about people. What secrets have you found to delivering customer happiness? Let us know in the comments or on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or Linkedin.

(Photo: Gezelle Rivera via Creative Commons)