Happy customers lead to increased sustainable growth. You already knew that, didn't you?
But there's a difference between a focus on customer service, and prioritizing it. Why?
It might seem like a waste to spend too much time or money on your customer service function. But remember, customer service is the ongoing connection between your customers and your business.
Awesome customer service is critical to your success because it maximizes the value from each and every customer. By delivering best in class customer service, businesses decrease customer acquisition costs and increase customer lifetime value. Faster.
Timo, a five star rated MeasureMatch service provider with multiple successful engagements under his belt, agrees.
In a recent backstage chat with MeasureMatch Founder and CEO James Sandoval, Timo pinpoints trust as being critical to success in landing MeasureMatch contracts:
"At the beginning you don't really have a good level of trust. You don't really have this level of deep trust and so you have to build it up with your work; with how you approach the client. And this is definitely something that for me, took some training to do; some refinements."
According to Salesforce in a 2019 report, customers will literally pay more to interact with a brand that do customer service well. And for B2B businesses, like the MeasureMatch marketplace and its supply side participants including consultancies, consultants, agencies and systems integrators, trust is even more important:
1. B2B often has more complex challenges leading to a higher amount of back-and-forth and a longer time to resolution
2. Collaboration is crucial. B2B customer service often works with multiple account stakeholders and must offer a consistent experience
3. Customer relationships are deeper in B2B because the customer service ratio is much lower than for B2C. Trust is everything
For startups to large enterprises, MeasureMatch is the marketplace platform connecting business leaders with amazing consulting and professional services partners.
So how can this critical element of trust be encouraged to develop between customer and brand?
There are three, simple principles that we practice here at MeasureMatch:
1. Be human first. While MeasureMatch is increasingly a self-service and automated platform, the layer of human customer service is what helps us to deliver a 5 star happiness ratings just north of 95% of the time.
2. Be helpful everywhere. An intuitive customer experience, a growing Help Center and a steady, but light flow of educational comms are imporant ingredients here.
3. Always be proactive. Customers will build trust more easily when you're in touch with them than when they have to get in touch with you. We aim to spot likely challenges early and manage risk throughout.
We can't always please all customers - such is the nature of marketplaces. And especially a marketplace with three distinct customer types all interacting with each other.
But we always try.
We believe our attention to customer service is what helps make us a uniquely valuable professional services marketplace, one that stands out from the self-service giants. We're not just saving time and providing cost efficiencies, but enabling deep quality which drives customer trust in what we do.
The ~5% of ratings at the 3 & 4 level (no 1s or 2s so far!) still bugs us though ;-)
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