According to the 2014 American Express Customer Service Barometer, 99% of consumers surveyed believe that getting a satisfactory answer or being connected to someone knowledgeable are the most important prerequisites for a great customer experience.
Once those prerequisites are met, 89% of those surveyed indicated that personalization is the most important factor in excellent customer service experiences.
When asked to identify the most important attribute of a successful customer service professional, 62% of consumers indicated that they want a representative who is efficient and empowered to fully handle requests.
Your team is what sets you apart from your competition. Make sure you are optimizing your team’s abilities and relationships.
Empower Your Team
How can you optimize grower relationships at your agribusiness? You need team members who are knowledgeable, efficient, and empowered to give personalized and satisfactory answers.
But how do you build that kind of team? Let’s take it one step at a time.
- Knowledgeable – In order for your team to be knowledgeable, they need to have access to the correct information. They need to know what contracts were made, when they were written, when loads were delivered, and what the customers’ prepay balances are.
- Efficient – An efficient team member is willing and able to access the aforementioned data quickly and easily from anywhere, with any device.
- Empowered – Using the knowledge and efficiency described above, the team member should be able to answer questions without needing to send the customer to the grain desk or the accounting department. The team member should be able to see all transactional and conversational data in one place and use it!
- Personalized – Your team members should be able to provide personalized information to each customer with the click of a button and respond to each customer in a personalized fashion. This comes from having transactional and personal data in one system.
- Satisfactory Answers – Again, in order to make this happen, your team must have access to all the necessary data to answer questions for the customers. Ideally, team members should no longer need to call someone else or return the call later when they are at their desk.
Make Your Team Information Aware
All of these things combined create team members who are “information aware,” so they can handle all customer service requests.
There are many internal benefits of your team being “information aware,” including:
- Reduced training time
- Reduced turnover
- Reduced time to contribution
- Reduced handling times
- Increased engagement
Information awareness improves your grower relationships by increasing first-contact resolution.
Satisfied Growers are Good for Business
It’s also worth acknowledging that a satisfied customer typically spends more money with you. According to the same American Express survey, “More than two thirds of American consumers say they’re willing to spend 14% more on average with a company that they believe delivers excellent service.”
The survey also found that 95% of consumers openly share their poor customer service experiences, usually with three times as many people as they share the good experiences.
These figures show us that keeping customers happy keeps their business and can even bring about more business through word of mouth. Whereas, poor service will not only lose you your current customers, but you can be sure that they will talk to others about their poor experience. Your company name and bottom line could suffer because of it.
With customer service being such an important factor to your organization, producing the highest results should be of utmost importance to you and your entire team. One way you can empower your team and provide information awareness is through a solution like Insight for CRM.