The customer’s journey doesn’t end when they make a purchase. In today’s market, that first purchase is only the beginning; the first step towards a long and pleasant relationship. The approach is exactly the reason why more companies use Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) to keep track of customers in the long run.

To maintain that relationship, however, you can no longer expect customers to do all the work. You have to run marketing campaigns that reach them, work on delivering value at every turn, and provide good customer service. That last part is important because it determines whether you can build a strong and loyal customer base.

So, how can you improve your customer service? Let’s find out!

Make It Easy

The first and most important thing you want to do is make it easy for customers to reach you after they have made their purchases. That’s how you begin forming a stronger relationship with the customers.

You can use live chat or email support to make it easy for customers to get help. That said, the most powerful customer service channel is still phone support. Providing customers with a number that they can call at any time is impactful.

You don’t have to invest in your own call center to be able to do this. In fact, call center technology trends – compiled by Humach, the leader of human and automated call centers – shows that cloud-based call center solutions are the way forward.

Leverage Customer Information

The next thing you want to do is making sure that each customer support officer can deliver a consistent, pleasant, and personalized experience to customers; this needs to happen at every turn too.

This may seem like a huge challenge to overcome, but the solution is simpler than you think. You just need to manage customers’ details and information properly. Using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, overcoming this challenge is even easier.

Customer support officers can pull out details about the customer they are helping. A name or a phone number is usually enough for the system to find the right data to display. Support officers can then use the details to get a better understanding of the customers and how they like to be treated.

Embedded Analysis

Speaking of using CRM to manage customer details, another practice worth implementing is adding notes and details about each customer on the profile itself. This further simplifies the process of delivering a personalized customer experience.

Normally, a support officer would look through a customer’s purchase history to know what product that customer uses. It is simple enough to look at the purchase history, but that introduces a lag in the workflow.

Imagine if there is a note with a summary on the customer. Instead of going through the purchase history, support officers can glance at the note and see “Mrs. A uses Product Z and X; usually has problems with X’s settings.”

It is much easier to communicate with the customer in a personal and thoughtful way with the note, isn’t it? At the end of the day, that is what really matters: showing customers that you care.