How We Deliver Exceptional Customer Service With A Small Staff

What is that one thing every company needs to provide? Customer service.

Be it a large enterprise or an SMB, all businesses need to provide good customer service.

However, what exactly is “exceptional” customer service? The real meaning can differ from company to company. For some, it can be 24/7 support where all the issues are resolved quickly. For others, it is amiable communication with customers. In a broad sense, “exceptional” customer service can be defined as – a company that is 100 percent customer-centric.

Usually, SMBs have time and workforce constraints pushing customer service as the last item on the priority list, not realizing that delivering basic customer services cannot be an afterthought. This is mainly because any business growth is majorly dependent on customers, and satisfied customers are essential to achieve organic growth.

And that’s where we come in. In spite of being a small business, Agile CRM strives to give exceptional customer service. Like many other SMBs, even we are a customer-centric business and recognize the vital role customer support plays in business growth. Being in the CRM business, customer becomes our foremost priority. And tending to their grievances in the best way possible is what differentiates us from our competitors.

Our customers are satisfied with our product because we work around-the-clock 24/7 to make sure the queries are answered promptly. Despite having a small team, we strive to meet our customer expectations using the most practical way possible.

Below are our key metrics and insights on how we improve our customer support service:

Improvement in Response Rate

As you may observe, earlier, our first response turnaround time was 13 hours. But we have improved it to 6 hours.
This was possible because of two reasons:

1. Our support team was divided into multiple shifts to match our global customer needs.
2. We scaled-up our support team from three to eight and divided them under multiple geographic regions.

Increase In Survey Response Rates

Forwarding customer surveys instantly, once the ticket was closed, was made a mandatory process to ascertain regular customer feedback. This is because immediate surveys result in prompt replies confirming that the message was not lost.

Complete Customer Satisfaction

According to the given stats, our customer satisfaction rate was around 80 percent. By April end, it improved to 88 percent, which is above the industry benchmark.

We were able to achieve this because of clear communications with the customers and by fixing issues on calls rather than sending out emails. We also started selecting random customers to get them on a call with our product managers to make sure they understand our product value. This helped us in getting positive testimonials and there was an overall improvement in our customer experience.

Omni-channel Assistance

Our support reps are very prompt in answering customer queries on various channels be it social media (like Twitter & Facebook), phone & e-mail queries or customer ticketing.

We believe that every customer query is important and ensure our answers across channels are consistent and accurate. Our support reps are in-sync with all the other departments and streamline all the queries flowing in from various departments, seamlessly.

Mentioned above are a few methods we use to provide better customer support. However, with constant change in time and technology, we grasped that a timely revision and restructure in the customer support strategy can help in many ways. One thing is for sure though – Exceptional customer support can be achieved by building a personal rapport with customers and this needs to be a recurring task.