Customer service is the art of keeping customers happy and letting companies identify where they have room to grow.
It’s given that customers will experience problems with any product or service a business offers. That’s why a functioning customer service team is essential in running a successful company. But putting one together is daunting.
Fortunately, some modern customer service staples can make that side of your company more efficient and straightforward. These staples include tools to help your customer service reps manage customer demands and monitor long-term service inquiries.
Of all the systems, tools, and strategies that can make things on a service team, service ticket systems and service tickets are two of the most practical and prominent options.
This article will review the purpose of customer service tickets, the importance of customer feedback, and how to leverage customer feedback to deliver a better customer experience.
What Is The Purpose of Customer Service Tickets?
A customer service ticket is a document that records all interactions between a customer and the customer service team. For example, a ticket is created and shared with the customer service agent when a customer submits a question or complaint.
The ticket logs their interaction on a thread, which can be used as a reference by either party.
These tickets are valuable to customers, customer service teams, and businesses. For customers, a customer service ticket offers a practical and personalized way to connect with customer service reps and get their problems resolved. They can describe an entire issue and add more details as the case progresses.
For customer service agents, tickets offer a trackable inventory of the customers they need to help. Customer service agents may work with over 40 customers daily, so it’s crucial to have a system that digitizes customer support communication while making processes such as logging and updating customer information more accessible and efficient.
And for businesses, resolved customer service tickets are crucial reference points for identifying issues with products or services and determining areas to improve. Customer service agents often relay common and recurring issues to product managers, who can address these problems for future product releases. Also, the insights from customer service tickets can act as the basis for knowledge base blog posts to help customers troubleshoot common issues with no help from customer service reps.
As businesses grow, they often deal with increasing customer service tickets from various channels. Unfortunately, such a high number of customer tickets often can be overwhelming, and handling them manually might be impossible. That’s where customer service tools, such as Zight (formerly CloudApp), come into play.
Zight (formerly CloudApp) is a customer service software used by over 4 million people globally and some of the biggest companies, such as Uber, Facebook, Adobe, and Salesforce. It enables customer service teams to capture their screens easily, create GIFs, and annotate screenshots with circles, arrows, lines, text boxes, and emojis. For instance, Buffer’s customer service agents save 24 hours a week by leveraging Zight (formerly CloudApp) to handle customer service tickets. By leveraging visual communication, Buffer communicates effectively and personally with their customers at every step of the customer journey.
First, Buffer’s team ensures they fully understand their customers’ questions and issues. When in doubt, they record their screen with audio to ask the customer about the problem. By enabling customers to give easy and quick answers, the customer service team at Buffer speeds up customer service response times.
The Importance of Feedback
Shep Hyken notes that customers love information because it gives them a feeling of control. Customer feedback is crucial because businesses that listen to their clients scale quickly. It’s an indispensable guide that gives your essential insights into every part of your business, helping you make more money and cut marketing expenses. Customer feedback is especially crucial in improving customer satisfaction and ultimately improving customer retention rates. Here are other reasons customer feedback is essential:
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Helps Identify Customer Needs and Preferences
Feedback is crucial in determining customers’ preferences and needs, especially when launching new products. Feedback helps businesses establish what’s essential to their customers–without customer feedback, a company might not meet the product needs of their customers. Consequently, it’d lose customers, causing high churn rates.
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Facilitates Comparisons with Competitors
Feedback also enables businesses to understand better how customers feel and use their products versus those from competitors. As a result, it’s crucial in establishing where a business’s services or products excel or fall short compared to other options in the market.
For instance, a consumer may like the performance of one company’s smartwatch but predominantly favor their competitor’s smartwatches because of their style and features. Feedback from customers may suggest that the first company needs to add more stylist features to their products.
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Improves Customer Service
Customer feedback may involve evaluating how customer service agents treat customers. Customer service satisfaction surveys are a popular form of marketing research. Businesses can leverage surveys to determine if their customers are getting their issues resolved and questions answered.
Further, feedback may help you determine if some customer service agents are rude to customers, especially if rudeness frequently arises during surveys.
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Helps Businesses Spot Market Trends
Also, feedback is crucial in detecting specific technological trends among customers. For instance, your competitor might introduce new technology that threatens the older technology your company uses. Conversely, if your customers say they prefer the latest technology, you must consider switching to the newest technology.
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It May Help You Convince New Customers to Continue Doing Business With You
Every business can sell a product to a given customer once. However, that doesn’t mean that customers will come back for more. While you can improve on aspects such as price, quality, and marketing of your products by observing the market and your competitors, there are some things that only a consumer can point out.
Customer feedback may give you insight into factors you had overlooked before, such as safe packing, free shipping, a user-friendly website, polite, and available customer service agents.
While you won’t get just positive reviews at first, the unique insight from your customers can help you understand what customers want, resulting in happy and repeat customers.
Utilizing Insights Into The Customer’s World
In a recent survey, 95% of respondents said that evaluating current customer data is the biggest obstacle to attaining marketing success. Customer feedback is essential because it offers insight into how your business performs with its target audience. If it’s negative, then there’s a need for improvement.
Also, customer feedback is crucial because it enables you to streamline your current marketing initiatives and only take the needed actions. Consumers have nothing to lose by sharing their opinions and thoughts about where your company can improve. You can leverage this information to improve all critical areas of your company and accomplish your marketing goals.
When customers give their feedback, that’s an opportunity for you and your customer service team to make beneficial changes to your business. You can use the information they leave to drive more sales, grow your email list, and improve brand awareness, depending on what you want to accomplish.
First, you need ways for web visitors and customers to leave their feedback. To do this, you can use customer survey forms that collect thoughts and opinions from your audience about your company. Optimize all forms on your site to make sure visitors and customers fill them out and submit them with ease.
Consider evaluating live chat on your site, so customers receive instant customer service. Leverage omnichannel support that proves customer service via multiple channels, such as email and social media. This way, you’ll tend to your customers’ needs regardless of where they interact with your company.
The more information you gather from customers, the more you’ll get a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not working for your business. For example, if you frequently get the same issues, complaints, and questions, it’s a sign that you need to make improvements. In addition, customers can offer you their thoughts and opinions about your products and services, so you know what you need to change.
You can use positive and negative feedback to upgrade your products and services. If, for example, your customers enjoy your site’s seamless checkout process, continue providing that service even in the future. However, if they constantly complain about a lack of detailed product descriptions, then fix that problem so that they get more information about your products.
Even negative comments you receive could be positive because they can help you refine your company to serve your customers better and generate more sales. There’s always something you can learn from your customers. If you take criticisms positively, they’ll help you deliver a better customer experience, ultimately improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Final Thoughts
To run a successful company, you must listen to your customers’ and web visitors’ feedback. Customer tickets can help you receive valuable information from your customers, which you can leverage to make product updates and offer a better customer experience. Further, both positive and negative customer feedback can help you simplify your marketing approaches, optimize your site, and provide stellar customer service. What customers say about your company plays a crucial role in its performance, so you’ll see positive and fruitful results if you use their thoughts and opinions constructively.