Key Ideas to Improve Conversions with Customer Service
‘Improving conversion rate’, has become a fancy phrase which most businesses are using to sell their offerings. While for some it might be true, the over-usage has rendered it meaning-less in many ways. Again, when it is applied to customer service, it’s essential to view the whole context before coming to a conclusion. There are numerous statistics and facts to prove that focusing on customer service can yield high dividends. However, it is also true that it’s a mix of many other things, with customer service being the primary component, is what it takes to deliver the goods that churn out better conversion.
The possibility of conversion rate is highly dependent on value proposition, which makes it a crucial conversion factor. Value Proposition can ideally be defined as the single most important reason you would give to your prospect customer to buy from you. If you want your customer service to improve the numbers related to the conversion rate, then it has to be your unique selling proposition. This simply means, when comparing all other factors like product, price, etc., with your competitors, it’s your customer service that is far superior to all. Also, when you talk about customer service, one must also take into considerations the various channels and methodologies that essentially go into increasing the conversion rates. Here are some of the ideal methods that can go in improving the conversion rates with customer service.
Reduce Customer Effort
When you ask customers to do things which they do not like, it can reduce the overall customer experience. For instance, if you are selling a product that requires the considerable amount of assembling, customer may not like the idea. But when you assure them of providing the required support, it might reduce their inhibitions. Again, the kind of support you provide to reduce the efforts can play a vital role. A demo manual along with easily accessible online demonstration will further reduce the efforts on the part of the customer. Moreover, when the customer still doesn’t get it right, sending across one of your technicians to get the product assembled is sure to add to the experience. When your potential customers are aware of this exceptional service, they will have enough reasons to buy from you, rather than your competitors. This in turn will help boost your conversion rate.
Create a FAQ/Knowledge-base
It can become difficult for firms to manage the increasing number of queries. The ideal way to deal with it is to give your customers a free access to your knowledge base that answers their queries. If you have your personnel answering the same questions time and again, it would lead to exhaustion of valuable resources. If you wish to improve your online channels to deliver enhanced customer service, then you can provide your customers with web self-service tools. Easy access to FAQs and their answers on each product page, with efficient tools to easily find other information is an ideal way to deal with growing knowledge based queries. Instead of picking up the phone to get their queries answered, customers can get instant answers using such self-service techniques. This not only improves customer experience but also lowers the customer support costs along with product page abandonment rates.
Build trust
When you want your customer service to increase conversion rates, it’s important that your team is trusted by the potential customers. For instance, let’s consider a customer calls into compare your product with your competitor’s. When he gets to hear only bad things about the other products while everything is just perfect about your product, chances are that he might not trust you. For this reason, giving a true evaluation of your product, while also accepting the evident positives of your competitor’s product is important to build trust. As per renowned Sales guru Zig Ziglar, there are only 4 reasons why one wouldn’t buy from you. The person doesn’t need your product, or he can’t afford it, or he is busy, or he simply doesn’t trust you. While nothing much can be done about the first three, but as a customer service team you can do your bit to build the trust factor. We can’t do much about the first 3 reasons, but we can build trust. Add trust elements to your website and see your conversions increase.
On online medium, you can demonstrate that you are trustworthy by building a professional website and have enough resources to support it and the mentioned service. Posting images of decision makers, product and demo videos are some of the way to get your target audiences’ trust. In addition, you can showcase the different avenues through which you can be accessed, along with your presence on various social media channels. If you have listed a telephone number, it is also important to ensure that someone in your team answers the incoming calls. Furthermore, when customer is in need of specific information, directing him or her to the right channels in your company to get those queries answered is important.
While there is no way to confirm that customer service will improve your conversion rate, there is ample evidence that focusing on enhancing customer experience through customer service leads to better conversion, sooner or later. Even though Sales personnel can do their best to drive the leads through Sales funnel, it is still left to customer service to retain the customers and improve the overall bottom-line of the company.
Key Takeaways
- There are numerous statistics and facts to prove that focusing on customer-service can yield high dividends.
- Offering customer service to reduce overall customer-effort can help boost conversions.
- Easy access to FAQs and their answers on each product page, with efficient tools to easily find other information, is an ideal way to deal with growing customer queries.
- When you want your customer service team to increase conversion rates, it’s important that your team is trusted by the potential customers.
- Having a trustable online presence, along with dedicated resources to interact with customers is important.