A few decades ago, good customer service might have been characterized by the Wal-Mart greeting or just the general atmosphere you get at fast food restaurants. Maybe the customer service at a restaurant was so good it’s put a dent in your wallet and now you’re in need for some credit repairs. Regardless, the experience of customer service stood on a primarily physical platform and almost strictly involved and relied on the nature of person-to-person interactions in real life in this past era.
According to a report published in Adweek, 88 percent of all companies are now using social media for marketing and customer service. So, given the prevalence of the Internet and virtual mediums, how do we craft an effective customer service experience to someone we don’t know behind the screen of a phone?
Optimize Your Site’s Navigability
Customer service has more or less become a bid from different sites to capture your attention. The virtual era has ushered in an age where getting the customer interested within the first few seconds now constitutes effective customer service. Of the elements that impact how much attention is given to your site, one of the most important ones is navigability.
People don’t want to spend time on a site that doesn’t look visually appealing right from the get-go, and they don’t want to waste their time on a site that doesn’t make impression easy for them. And you’d better expect in this information heavy age that people are going to be darting around different sites at an immense pace. In fact, Hubspot reports that 55 percent of visitors spend less than 15 seconds on the average website.
So that’s the general rundown of the problem we have. People now live in a fast-paced, information dominated virtual landscape where everyone is competing for everyone else’s attention. You’ll need something, some secret weapon that will pull your visitors in and really drag them into engaging with the different elements of your site. Part of this strategy involves improving the navigability of your site.
To do this, you’ll need to introduce an element of creativity and inspire a feeling of wonder in your visitors as soon as they hit your landing pages. There is literally hundreds of examples of great designs in terms of artistic visuals that just mesh incredibly well with content in a knockout combination for navigability. The key is to make sure that your users are clear on where you want them to go and attracted by the stunning visual impact of your site which should serve to complement that navigability.
Engage in Research On Client Behaviors
Don’t leave yourself blinded when it comes to research on how your clients receive and browse your website. “Leave nothing to chance” is an expression that applies very appropriately in this case. The bottom line is that if you want your business to grow and be successful from an customer service perspective, you’ll need to know what your customers are actually doing on your site.
There are several services that offer things such as activity heat maps and that track the number of links on your website which receive the most attention. One stellar and intuitive example of these services is MouseFlow, a dynamic software that tracks, records, and allows you to replay many client sessions to see which aspects of your navigability efforts are paying off and how people generally perceive your site.
Other services, like Deluxe’s social media marketing packages, can allow your business to skyrocket in its exposure. This will create a synergistic effect when combined with analytical software pertaining to tracking softwares for navigability. The social media marketing strategy will aid in generating tons of potential visitors to your site, which you can then use to refine aspects of your site’s navigability using the collected data.
Get A Responsive Team Prepped and Ready
We’ve been talking a lot about site navigability, but we should not overlook other aspects of customer service that also occupy a significant role in the digital era such as a responsive, active support team. Effective virtual customer service encapsulates providing an intuitive and attractive personal experience in terms of how the customer interacts and explores your site and in being proactive in developing relationships with your visitors.
Currently, there are a number of great applications such as Intercom that allow for the easy organization, filtering, and prioritization of clients. Get a group of people together, train them on the backend details of the regular problems encountered in your business, and then get cracking on engaging and capturing visitors that happen on your site. The virtual era of effective customer service centers around attention, and the commodification of that attention is an significant concept to grasp as an online business owner.
