A pleasant customer experience is critical to your company’s success since a satisfied customer is more likely to become a loyal one who can help you increase revenue.
A consumer who is loyal to your company promotes your business through word-of-mouth marketing, and advocates for your brand and product or service is the greatest marketing money can buy.
You’re presumably reading this because you want to improve your customer service. Surely, every company has gone through a lot of changes in the last few months. The lockdown and social isolation have had an influence on the volume of support requests and the level of customer assistance provided.
How can you keep up with the competition and go above and beyond in providing exceptional customer service?
You can’t possibly learn all of the practices on your own. There is, however, a more reliable source of information: professionals who have started and succeeded with their customer success or assisted other firms.
To help you with the process, we contacted 14 different bloggers, entrepreneurs, and branding professionals to gather their best advice on how to master the SaaS customer experience.
We interviewed the experts and composed a roundup that covered the below-mentioned topics:
- What do you believe is the most important factor in building long-term client relationships?
- What’s your strategy for identifying and achieving customer expectations, values, and desired outcomes?
- What was the most difficult aspect of providing effective customer service in the previous year (during the pandemic)?
- What tools and services did you use to make your customer service better?
- Can you provide us with one piece of advice that will ensure a fantastic customer experience?
- How do you keep up with the latest developments and trends in your industry?
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Here’s what they all had to say.
1. Mia Naumoska, CMO at Chanty
What do you believe is the most important factor in building long-term client relationships?
I believe the most important factor in building and maintaining long-term client relationships is prioritizing user experience. We do our absolute best to provide the most exquisite user experience throughout the entire cycle, which results in satisfied and secure customers, which eventually leads to strong, long-term relationships.
What’s your strategy for identifying and achieving customer expectations, values, and desired outcomes?
Our strategy for identifying and achieving customer expectations is continuous and detailed communication with our customers, both existing and potential. From in-depth questionnaires and follow-ups to market research, we do our best to make our customers’ voices heard and taken into account.
What was the most difficult aspect of providing effective customer service in the previous year (during the pandemic)?
The previous year, more specifically the global pandemic, brought in a much greater demand for customer service. However, this was promptly dealt with by making the necessary internal changes.
What tools and services did you use to make your customer service better?
Our greatest customer service tool that we use is our live chat on our website. Customers have the chance to request any necessary information quickly and efficiently. In addition, our Chanty platform allowed our team to stay connected and on top of any arising issues, which undeniably improved customer service.
Can you provide us with one piece of advice that will ensure a fantastic customer experience?
If I had to give one piece of advice for outstanding customer experience, it would be consistently listening and taking into account the customers’ feedback. By doing so you can then understand what’s missing and what needs to be modified for the perfect customer experience.
How do you keep up with the latest developments and trends in your industry?
I do my best to keep up with the latest trends by continuously reading new and relevant journals, studies, blogs, etc. I also stay on top of all social media platforms in case of any new developments in the industry.
2. Marcos Bravo, Content Specialist at Live Chat
What do you believe is the most important factor in building long-term client relationships?
Knowing your customer well enough so you can understand the reasons they chose you and double down on nurturing those. And be where they are, when they need you, offer a true omnichannel experience.
What’s your strategy for identifying and achieving customer expectations, values, and desired outcomes?
Listen! and collect data, as much as you can. That way you can map the journey and identify problems before they occur, make sure your communication strategy shares the common values to generate honest engagement, and turn your customers into promoters.
What was the most difficult aspect of providing effective customer service in the previous year (during the pandemic)?
It didn’t change much from the customer side, maybe a slight increase, but the main thing was to take care of our team so we can keep delivering an excellent customer experience. Making sure they had all the tools and being in constant communication with them allowed us to maintain the level of service people know us for.
What tools and services did you use to make your customer service better?
We focused on making sure our own process was constantly improved and implementing features faster than before, we also assured that our partners had our back and us theirs, to keep delivering a good service. More than tools it was to streamline our own processes and products
Can you provide us with one piece of advice that will ensure a fantastic customer experience?
Not only train your team to understand your customer, but also give them the right tools and a tone of voice that they can rely on, that way they can seamlessly spread the experience around different channels and make the customer feel that they are talking to one strong brand.
How do you keep up with the latest developments and trends in your industry?
Instead of looking around to see what’s happening, we rely on listening to the needs of our customers and creating our own trends. A customer-centric approach to every step is a must.
3. Duncan Stockdill, CEO at Capsulecrm.com
What do you believe is the most important factor in building long-term client relationships?
Trust is critical for long-term client relationships. You can’t fake it. Be honest and transparent, and then deliver on expectations. To do that, you need to know your clients, what problems they have, what they want, what you’ve promised them. As a result, we have many clients that have been with us since we set up in 2009.
What’s your strategy for identifying and achieving customer expectations, values, and desired outcomes?
We always place what the customer wants at the heart of our product and service development, so we’ve built an extensive customer feedback process since we founded Capsule. For example, feedback is often sent to us directly or via social media, but we also have an NPS scoring process that allows us to identify any pain points and resolve them. It’s also crucial to understand why customers leave so that you can address any issues that they may have had. We make sure we capture this via a combination of surveys and customer interviews. We then build this feedback into our development process or create projects to tackle them.
What was the most difficult aspect of providing effective customer service in the previous year (during the pandemic)?
As a business, we were well set up to work remotely. We also managed to keep the same number of people providing support to our customers, so we were fortunate to not have too much upheaval. Empathy is a key quality in a support role, so the toughest aspect was just knowing that so many businesses were struggling during an unpredictable period. Every member of the Capsule team was very focused on helping customers to adapt and build for the future.
What tools and services did you use to make your customer service better?
We believe that having a CRM really does help you to provide a better and more consistent customer experience. During the pandemic Capsule as a solution really ensured we could work from a single version of the truth for managing customer accounts. It allowed us to understand customer behavior, communicate effectively and make important decisions to steer the business.
Can you provide us with one piece of advice that will ensure a fantastic customer experience?
Give customers a frictionless experience. By that I mean make it easy to do business with you and reduce the customer effort wherever they are on their journey. Provide efficient, friendly customer service and spend time optimizing those touchpoints, but also allow customers to self-serve where they want to. At Capsule, we focus closely on ensuring customers have what they need when they need it
How do you keep up with the latest developments and trends in your industry?
There isn’t a single source of information for achieving this. It’s a blend of customer feedback, industry news sources, and technology sites, monitoring competitors and insight from investors. These channels are tried and tested the world over, so it’s critical to ensure you have the right processes and forums to make use of the information and put it into action.
4. Sandeep Kashyap, CEO at ProofHub
What do you believe is the most important factor in building long-term client relationships?
The ultimate key to building long-term relationships with your clients is customer value and satisfaction. It’s true that no two customers are alike. They have diverse perspectives, decisions, and behaviors, for example. As a result, the approach should be customer-centric, ensuring that customers are satisfied with whatever service they receive. When a product fails to satisfy a customer’s expectations, the customer feels disappointed. If the consumer receives exactly what he wants and the product meets or exceeds those expectations, the customer becomes extremely satisfied and helps your company grow more.
What’s your strategy for identifying and achieving customer expectations, values, and desired outcomes?
We collect feedback from our consumers at every stage of the process to determine their needs. Customers’ requirements can be identified in a variety of ways, including focus groups, listening to customers on social media, sending out emails, having one-on-one interviews, conducting surveys, and more. Here at ProofHub, we believe that the fastest and the easiest way to understand your customers is to speak to them directly about their expectations.
What was the most difficult aspect of providing effective customer service in the previous year (during the pandemic)?
My answer is going to be a bit different as compared to other leaders or managers. Surprisingly, we did not face many disruptions because of the pandemic. Our entire customer support team could work together and provide excellent customer service regardless of where they were working. ProofHub helped our teams and customers on the same page and work effortlessly just like they used to (before the pandemic).
What tools and services did you use to make your customer service better?
ProofHub and Emails. There is no doubt in the fact that ProofHub did help our team members to work efficiently remotely as it unifies everything like clients, tasks, files, communication, notes, and more in one place which makes it easy for individuals to gain clarity about what needs to be done without any sort of confusion.
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Can you provide us with one piece of advice that will ensure a fantastic customer experience?
As a customer support team, you spend your days troubleshooting for customers, which necessitates in-depth product knowledge. A broad understanding of your product is an important customer service skill. You should ideally believe in your product, be able to discuss features and use cases intelligently, and demonstrate to your consumers how the product may benefit them. Your goal is to make sure your consumers get the most out of their purchases and feel like they received a good deal.
How do you keep up with the latest developments and trends in your industry?
I’m a voracious reader. I’m always reading about my field, our business, and the world at large. Follow industry trade magazines and websites regularly, as well as national, regional, and local newspapers, notable bloggers, and business thought leaders.
5. Larry Kim, CEO at Mobilemonkey.com
What do you believe is the most important factor in building long-term client relationships?
The most important factor in building client relationships is to ensure that you stay true to your promise and maintain the quality of your service throughout the customer journey.
What’s your strategy for identifying and achieving customer expectations, values, and desired outcomes?
Keyword research and social listening are the keys to identifying customer expectations.
What was the most difficult aspect of providing effective customer service in the previous year (during the pandemic)?
Businesses find it difficult to retain returning customers as they have a hard time connecting with their customers. It’s best to set up a channel where you and your customers can connect regularly, like on social media platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct Messages. It’s not hard to set up a social media chatbot to ensure that they can still connect with your brand even when you’re away from your computer.
What tools and services did you use to make your customer service better?
Set up messaging automation on your social media channels (Facebook and Instagram) using MobileMonkey.
Can you provide us with one piece of advice that will ensure a fantastic customer experience?
Empathize with your customers. Showing empathy to your customers allows you to understand situations from their perspectives.
How do you keep up with the latest developments and trends in your industry?
We make sure that we follow industry news and relevant people from our niche regularly to keep up with the latest trends and competition.
6. Josh Brown, SEO + Content Marketing Manager at Helpjuice
What do you believe is the most important factor in building long-term client relationships?
I believe the most important factor for building long-term client relationships revolves around trust. When your organization looks to create a high-trust culture, your employees are more engaged and productive which leads to the ability to provide better customer experiences and your customers are more confident with continuing to do business with your organization.
What’s your strategy for identifying and achieving customer expectations, values, and desired outcomes?
This is where creating a stellar customer experience comes into play as that’s one factor that can help with building your organization’s overall reputation and trust factor.
What tools and services did you use to make your customer service better?
We stand behind our product Helpjuice which is a knowledge-base solution that allows customers to self-serve and find solutions to their issues when it’s convenient for them (we also use chatbot software to help with self-serving – this chatbot software makes use of our knowledge-base solution as the ‘brains’). Our knowledge base software is also used by our support team as a way to provide better service to customers who contact us for support. We make use of live chat software, provide phone support, and in general make getting in touch with us as easy as possible.
Can you provide us with one piece of advice that will ensure a fantastic customer experience?
There are many ways to ensure that you provide customers with a great experience – one way that I would recommend is being proactive when it comes to customer service. Proactive organizations can anticipate the needs of their customers ahead of time and take action which prevents small issues from becoming big ones. Not only does this ensure that you provide a great experience for your customers, but it also shows customers that you are invested in their success which leads to improved loyalty.
7. Daniel Pison, Head of marketing at Liveagent
What do you believe is the most important factor in building long-term client relationships?
The most important factor in any long-term relationship is honesty. It does not matter whether it’s marriage or multichannel customer care, your partner must always know what “is involved” in the relationship.
What’s your strategy for identifying and achieving customer expectations, values, and desired outcomes?
We live in a very dynamic time, and expectations and values are actively adapting to it. Therefore, the only strategy that has worked for us is to use all the possibilities that the market offers. From personal communication(for example using 24/7 customer care) through analyzes of best practices within our clientele in selected segments to monitoring direct or indirect competition.
What was the most difficult aspect of providing effective customer service in the previous year (during the pandemic)?
It was Definitely moving the business into the online space. Tools like live chat, help desk software, ticketing are no longer a competitive advantage. They have become a necessity.
What tools and services did you use to make your customer service better?
We used our own tool, Liveagent to make sure that we deliver excellent customer service.
Can you provide us with one piece of advice that will ensure a fantastic customer experience?
To be honest, there is no advice to ensure a fantastic customer experience. Every client is expecting something different, but maybe there is one “know your client”.
How do you keep up with the latest developments and trends in your industry?
Implementation of current technological trends, meeting customer expectations, and marketing communications are interconnected vessels. One shifts the other. It is precisely the close connection between these three segments that move us forward.
8. Pascal Van Opzeeland, Marketing Director at Userlike
What do you believe is the most important factor in building long-term client relationships?
At Userlike, we’ve learned that great customer service doesn’t just happen, you need to engineer it. Most of our customers work in support, so it’s a must for us to also excel in this field.
What’s your strategy for identifying and achieving customer expectations, values, and desired outcomes?
We stay in close contact with our customers. We like to make sure they’re getting the most out of our product and are satisfied, so we contact them for interviews to learn what we’re doing well and what we can improve. We even have a group of “customer influencers” who want to help us build the best product possible. They give us feedback regarding product plans, designs, you name it.
What was the most difficult aspect of providing effective customer service in the previous year (during the pandemic)?
We were really fortunate since 90% of our communication was already digital. However, many of our team members had to adjust to having home distractions like kids and pets while talking to customers. Everyone was really understanding and accommodating though.
What tools and services did you use to make your customer service better?
We use our own chat solution as our main contact channel. Customer messaging grew in popularity during the pandemic so we focused on improving it even more. We noticed an increased need for the option to do video calls and decided to build it into our software.
Can you provide us with one piece of advice that will ensure a fantastic customer experience?
This one has been most influential for our own setup: Don’t focus on exceeding customer expectations; focus on reducing customer effort. Research has shown that customers stay when their experience with your company is effortless. We recommend measuring your customer’s effort levels using our post, “4 Steps to the Right Customer Effort Score (CES) Question.”
How do you keep up with the latest developments and trends in your industry?
We depend on podcasts, books, and online courses. It’s important to us to have a good personal knowledge management system so that we can use what we learn in a way that works for us. We also stay involved in the community through customer interviews and events. We’re also involved in our community. We stay in contact with our customers through interviews and events to gain new ideas on how to improve our product. This helps us keep up with the trends that actually matter to our customers.
9. Sudhir Naidu, CEO at Troop Messenger
What do you believe is the most important factor in building long-term client relationships?
By ensuring to deliver what they need! A product has to be chiseled enough until it is ready to serve the changing needs of the client’s expectations, and usage.
What’s your strategy for identifying and achieving customer expectations, values, and desired outcomes?
Of course, it’s an undeniable fact to go with the widely followed practices such as surveys, social listening, distributing the data-driven results to the concerned teams, etc., However, my best strategy is to bank upon the in-app feedback facility and on our customer success teams to serve them with the best!
What was the most difficult aspect of providing effective customer service in the previous year (during the pandemic)?
Converting the working model of work from the office to work from home was one of our pain points during the pandemic time. However, we were able to adapt to the ‘New Normal-WFH’ model, swiftly.
What tools and services did you use to make your customer service better?
Live Chat support with click2magic.com, 24/7 email assistance, helpline customer support, remote screen control, product demo, etc., are the tools and services that we use for ensuring seamless team collaboration and user onboarding.
Can you provide us with one piece of advice that will ensure a fantastic customer experience?
Never build anything that you fantasize about. Because that is not what your end-users are looking for. Therefore, always hear from them! Make sure you and your team are accessible across all modes to provide the best customer support that you can.
How do you keep up with the latest developments and trends in your industry?
Believe me, the features and facilities that we offer in our product are way ahead of our market competitors. Our teams are making us be in line with the latest trends of the collaboration industry! Also, we invest a lot of time into research and experimentation to be competitive and stay ahead of the game!
10. Sebastian Schaeffer, CTO and Owner at dofollow.io
What do you believe is the most important factor in building long-term client relationships?
Long-term client relationships are built on the back of value and customer service. It is important that your value proposition makes your product more appealing than the competition and that you are easy to get in touch with to troubleshoot problems and provide assistance.
What’s your strategy for identifying and achieving customer expectations, values, and desired outcomes?
Customer service and retention are a function of staying in touch with people and asking for feedback. It is also important to be open to feature requests, as long as it aligns with business goals and can be quantified in terms of ROI.
What was the most difficult aspect of providing effective customer service in the previous year (during the pandemic)?
Because so many people were working from home, we had to deal with large groups of people at the same company at the same time, which was taxing on bandwidth and sometimes chaotic.
What tools and services did you use to make your customer service better?
Integrating customer service with CRM and using programs like Loom to develop demos and tutorials made our customer service more automated, which was great on our end, and more on-demand, which was beneficial to our users.
How do you keep up with the latest developments and trends in your industry?
We join industry associations, go to their events, take training, and engage in online forums. We also make an effort to broaden our network. We meet people both inside and outside of the sector. Meet with colleagues, partners, and clients regularly to discuss company developments. These discussions are bound to generate new ideas.
11. Mykola Tymkiv, COO at MacKeeper
What do you believe is the most important factor in building long-term client relationships?
We always understood that the market will always have similar competitors with similar products, so we put all of our focus on offering the ultimate customer experience. Digital security is a serious thing, and we offer 24/7 support for all of our customers. Building trust is the most important factor for long-term relationships, and our best results come from the customers we helped the most.
What was the most difficult aspect of providing effective customer service in the previous year (during the pandemic)?
Offering 24/7 support was not easy during the pandemic, and we were often faced with high queues due to agent shortages. We quickly adapted and assigned backup agents that can hop in and clear things up when needed.
What tools and services did you use to make your customer service better?
We were never too shy to experiment with new customer service technologies. We tried using chatbots for a while and then settled for a fully human approach to customer service. Today, we offer 24/7 live chat support along with rich FAQ content for quick fixes.
Can you provide us one piece of advice that will ensure a fantastic customer experience?
Patience and kindness go a long way. A portion of our audience is older people who want to be digitally secure, so they’re very passionate about our product. We trained all of our agents to be kind and patient with every customer because it all comes back to you in the long term.
How do you keep up with the latest developments and trends in your industry?
We keep up with tech security trends through various sources, publications, partners, forums, etc. We also conduct extensive research on our competitors to see how we can improve our product for the market.
12. Luke Thomas, Founder and CEO at Friday.app
Can you provide us one piece of advice that will ensure a fantastic customer experience?
As the leader of a company, I try to create as much time as possible to talk to customers. One method I use is that 24 hours after someone creates an account, I will send them a personalized (yes, it’s automated) email asking them if they have feedback or suggestions on how we can improve.
13. Josef Trauner, CEO at Usersnap
What do you believe is the most important factor in building long-term client relationships?
Truly listening to our customers! I believe many companies say “we listen to our customers” to check a box, but really listening isn’t so easy. Agile product development typically is a continuous cycle of only building, measuring and then learning. At Usersnap, we use our own product to listen to our customers first. We collect customer feedback, learn from those insights, build our product, and measure its success. By listening, we have a clear direction of what to build and why.
14. Olek Potrykus, Head of Customer Success at Tidio
What do you believe is the most important factor in building long-term client relationships?
A personalized onboarding plan is an absolute must-have for building long-term relationships with our clients. Onboarding is the time when new customers learn how to use a new product, have a chance to ask questions, and resolve their first doubts. By offering 24/7 support and immediate assistance, we can recognize clients’ needs and offer a more satisfying customer service experience.
What tools and services did you use to make your customer service better?
To ensure the highest quality of customer service, we use our products: Tidio Live Chat and Tidio Chatbots. Additionally, to improve our CX team’s performance and increase customer satisfaction, we use Klaus – a conversational and QA platform for support teams. It helps us to improve our peer review system and enhance mutual learning.
Can you provide us with one piece of advice that will ensure a fantastic customer experience?
Never assume you know what your customers think – ask them directly!
No matter how hard you try to put yourself in your customers’ shoes, it’s always best to reach out to the customers and verify your thoughts. Thanks to an in-depth interview, we can understand the actual reason behind a client’s request, and the results can sometimes be surprising.
15. David Miller: Project Manager at ProProfs Project
What do you believe is the most important factor in building long-term client relationships?
I believe that constant communication is the most important factor in building long-term business relationships with clients. To do so, the clients need to know what’s going on in their project and you should proactively keep them in the loop.
What’s your strategy for identifying and achieving customer expectations, values, and desired outcomes?
The strategy is crystal clear and that involves an in-depth customer feedback process. At every stage of the project, we are transparent to the clients and listen to their feedback to provide them with a delightful experience. Moreover, we constantly host surveys to get valuable responses from our existing customers to make improvements.
What was the most difficult aspect of providing effective customer service in the previous year (during the pandemic)?
We planned well for a remote work environment and all our team members were effective throughout the pandemic to provide a great customer service experience. The key was to create an omnichannel customer experience so that clients could seamlessly reach out to us in such challenging times.
What tools and services did you use to make your customer service better?
We use our own set of tools, ProProfs Project for managing & collaborating all the clients’ projects from a single dashboard and ProProfs Live Chat plus Help Desk to interact with existing and potential customers. We even have a detailed FAQ plus guide section that we easily set up using our own Knowledge Base software.
Can you provide us one piece of advice that will ensure a fantastic customer experience?
Simply practice patience, empathy, and consistency. Fantastic customer service is all about continuous learning from past experiences. Always listen to your customers and communicate with them clearly for a faster resolution.
How do you keep up with the latest developments and trends in your industry?
Competition is always good to provide customers with an even better experience. I read voraciously about the industry and my market in general. My social network and email subscriptions help me stay up to date with the latest trends.
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Wrapping Up!
We hope you found this expert roundup helpful in learning how to improve the customer experience. If you like some of the above-mentioned strategies, all you have to do now is put them into action and make your customers super happy!
