Customer Expectations Are Evolving—Is Your Service Keeping Up?
These days, customers are used to the very best. Competition among businesses is stiff, so companies are pulling out all the stops to provide a great experience to win more customers. This culture is now so commonplace that clients and buyers expect certain standards—or they go elsewhere.
Below, we explore evolving customer expectations, the risks of not meeting these expectations and how Hallmark's Connect and Care platforms make it easy for you to show appreciation to customers in such a way that will have a real impact.
What Are the Current Trends in Consumer Expectations?
Customer expectations around quality, speed and access to service are high. But to narrow things down, current trends around consumer expectations revolve around three key aspects:
Great customer service is essential. Most business leaders (around 73%) invest more in this area because they’ve seen customer service boost sales and growth.
Treating clients as individuals is a strong theme. Consumers no longer want to be treated like “one of the masses;” they want a personalized experience, and they tend to stay with businesses that cater to this need.
The rising power of customers in the buying process and their high expectations are also driving companies to invest more in prioritizing quality customer experience.
What Are the Risks of Not Meeting Evolving Customer Expectations?
1. You can lose your competitive edge.
A failure to innovate and adapt to changing customer tastes and technological advancements in the market can cause your business to fall behind competitors who keep up with these shifts. For example, once-mighty retailers Blockbuster and Circuit City didn’t keep up with market changes, and they declined all the way to extinction.
2. Customers walk away.
Unsatisfied consumers might leave negative reviews and switch to a competitor that offers them what they want. Happy customers are key to maintaining your business’s positive brand image, customer loyalty and profitability.
3. You unwittingly create a fragmented customer experience.
Many customers still describe their experience with most services as lacking any streamlined processes or cohesion—just look at the online reviews full of confusion and frustration. As such, it’s important to provide a smooth experience to your customers. A smooth and easily understandable process will increase the likelihood of positive feedback and repeat sales.
4. Your business incurs a perceived lack of empathy.
As mentioned earlier, consumers want to be treated as individuals. However, there still exists a large gap between personalized service availability and customer expectations. Around 66% of customers expect businesses to understand their unique needs, but only 34% report that companies treat them like individuals. The future of customer service truly hinges on personalized interactions with every consumer.
How Customer Service Agents Can Enhance Service Quality Beyond Traditional Calls
Relying on a traditional call center customer experience strategy is no longer effective. Customers expect more than just a phone call. So, what can your agents do to keep consumers satisfied enough to return for more?
Agents should be trained and equipped to treat customers as individuals and provide tailor-made support and experiences. Their tools must enable them to leverage real-time insights, customer profiles, user data, past interactions and more to enhance customer satisfaction.
Another great way to get a thumbs-up from consumers is to train agents in omnichannel engagement. This allows them to interact with customers in the latter’s preferred channels like email, social media, live chat, direct mail or phone call. This improves brand engagement and customer loyalty.
Partner With Hallmark and Level Up Your Customer Satisfaction
When you choose Hallmark's Connect and Care solutions, you are providing your customer service agents with a wonderful way to deepen customer relationships and personalize interactions.
The Connect solution has an immense catalog of gifts, cards and messages. Agents can send culturally relevant, personalized greeting cards with authentic handwriting to honor a genuine connection with customers.
Connect also integrates seamlessly with your business processes and provides smooth data integration for CRM tools, user management and a branded site that always aligns with the company's branding to provide a more cohesive experience.
Meanwhile, the Care solution from Hallmark simplifies sending these cards. Agents can usually dispatch a card in under a minute. The platform also comes with real handwriting fonts that can be printed, adding a personal touch to envelopes and cards.
Care also comes with robust reporting and data integration for smooth customer data management, diverse language options and a large product catalog for all occasions. Hallmark also provides training and user support to ensure that you can effectively manage the platform and experience all the benefits that Care has to offer.
With Hallmark by your side, your business can keep up with evolving customer expectations and give your clients the personal touch that they crave. Don’t hesitate to contact our team for more information about our services and how we can help you win the hearts of customers, old and new!