Customer Service Strategy. Most highly successful businesses have one thing in common; they excel at customer service. It’s simple. When you keep your customer happy, they keep coming back. The data supports this, but the effect of excellent customer service goes beyond just keeping customers coming through the door. One study found that customers who have exceptional experiences with brands spend, on average, 140% more than their less satisfied counterparts. Loyal customers are also known as brand promoters; they advertise your brand for you by telling their friends and family how great you are.
Most companies understand that customer service is essential, but few companies know how to truly excel at delivering exceptional customer service. That’s the hard part. In this definitive guide, we hope to break down some of the mystery surrounding excellent customer service and give you something you can put into action. Let’s get started.
What Makes Excellent Customer Service?
Several components result in excellent customer service. Companies need the right mix of efforts and the right strategy. Here are some of the significant features of excellent customer service:
- Consistency – Customers should expect the same level of service every time, no matter what communication channel they opt for.
- Feedback follow-up – Companies should follow up on both positive and negative customer feedback they receive.
- Understanding of customer expectations – The best companies know what their customers consider to be good or excellent customer service. You can’t deliver what you think is good customer service. It has to be what your customers think is good customer service.
- Happy and engaged staff – You can’t deliver excellent customer service without happy and active agents. Agents must be knowledgeable about your products and your brand and skilled at handling people.
- Quick response time – Customers become increasingly frustrated the longer they have to wait. If they don’t get a quick resolution or even an acknowledgment of the issue, they are likely to think you aren’t trying to solve it or you don’t care about them. One study found that the average email response time of the top 100 retailers was 17 hours. However, the companies that excelled in customer service had much shorter response times. For example, Office Depot had a response time of less than one hour.
- Thinking long term – Treating each customer as a customer for life and employing strategies that match this. Remember, just a few customers feeling underappreciated or having a bad experience can cause a ripple effect, harming your brand’s reputation and revenues.
- WOWing your customers – This is all about surpassing your customer’s expectations. Meeting expectations should be your baseline (something you should do every time, without fail). When you exceed expectations by positively surprising your customers, you create positive memories that drive more customer activity (they buy more products or promote your brand).
Today we’re mostly going to be focusing on the last point – Wowing your customers. We’re going to be discussing how to wow your customers through customer quizzes.
How Can I Use Quizzes to Improve Customer Service?
There are two fundamental types of data you can collect from quizzes: qualitative and quantitative data.
Qualitative Data and Quantitative Data
Qualitative data cannot be measured. It is unstructured and non-numerical and is better summed up as data that approximates and characterizes. By contrast, quantitative data is something that is measurable and numerical. For example, your weight, height, or the amount of money you have is quantitative data. You can put a figure on it. Your hair color, blood type, the name of the street you live on, or your favorite band is qualitative data.
To improve your customer service operation, you must collect both types of data. Quantitive data can tell you how your customers behave, but qualitative data can help you establish patterns and determine why they behave that way.
There are many qualitative data collection methods, including:
- Focus groups
- Open-ended surveys or quizzes
- Observation
- Case studies
You can use quizzes in the same way you use customer surveys – to collect information from customers about their preferences. You can use quizzes to determine what they like and dislike about your product.
Using Quizzes as Part of Your Marketing Strategy
Okay, so you can use quizzes in a similar way to customer surveys, but what about something more informal and fun? First, let’s look at the difference between quizzes, surveys, and polls since these terms are often used interchangeably.
What is a Survey?
Generally, a quiz’s goal is to generate complex feedback rather than just raw data. They tend to be very interactive, and respondents have to be specific with their answers and go into detail when asked to. Not all surveys are complex. For example, customer satisfaction surveys are simple because they usually only ask customers to rate their experience on a scale of 1-5. However, they are still specific (each much corresponds to the level of satisfaction). And the results are meaningful for the business. The results drive action.
What is a Poll?
A poll aims to capture opinions or votes. It’s essentially a snapshot of customer sentiment at the time the poll is conducted. Polls are more broadly used by independent or third-party bodies to assess the health of an industry. For example, a polling body might ask a cross-section of the population how they perceive customer service across the different services they use. The poll might show that banks generally provide poor customer service, while Streaming services offer excellent customer service or vice versa.
What is a Quiz?
Quizzes are typically informal and are aimed at testing a person’s knowledge on a topic. You’ve probably seen tons of entertainment quizzes during your time on the internet. Buzzfeed is well known for creating fun entertainment quizzes that generate lots of traffic.
How to Use Quizzes in Marketing
Quizzes are fun, and anything fun can be used in marketing. People like doing quizzes because they like feeling validated. We don’t typically do quizzes on topics we do not know well because that’s not fun. If you’re pretty good at geography, you might choose to do a quiz where you have to name all US states, but if you don’t like hockey, you’re unlikely to do another quiz on naming hockey teams.
There’s actually a type of quiz that always goes viral on Facebook that uses this need for validation to its advantage. The quiz can be on any topic but typically follows these patterns:
- It’s on a broad topic that almost everyone has some experience in. For example, vocabulary, intelligence, math’s. Something you learned in school or is innate (intelligence).
- They appeal to your ego – Yep, that’s right. These quizzes are designed to trigger your inner narcissist. They will typically say something like, “Can you pass this vocabulary quiz? Only 5% of people will get all the answers right”.
- They are rigged – You always, or almost always win or do exceptionally well. When you win, you get to feel like you’re smarter than 95% of people. You feel validated and good about yourself.
This isn’t the type of quiz you want to give to your customers, but it serves as an excellent example of how effective quizzes are at hacking our brains. So, how do you hack your customer’s minds in a less click-bait way?
Quizzes for marketing can be a great way of engaging your customers using a fresh type of content. It’s a good idea to vary the content you put out. For example, you can publish blog posts, webinars, podcasts, FAQs, and also quizzes. The key is to align your quiz with your industry. For example, if you sell photo editing software, you could create a quiz like “how much do you really know about photography?”. When you post your quiz on social media, you can drive more customers to your website and generate more leads, and eventually, more sales.
Tips on Creating Quizzes for Customer Service and Marketing
Make Your Quizzes Sharable
Quizzes are a great way of engaging with your customers more actively. Customers or potential customers get to have a bit of fun and test their knowledge and skills. These quizzes can also help your brand reputation and brand culture. If you share fun quizzes, your company is more likely to be seen as a fun and customer-focused company.
To maximize on this, design quizzes that can be easily shared between people. People often like to show off their quiz results and ask their friends and family to conduct the quiz too so they can all compare answers. It would be best if you made it as easy as possible for users to share your quiz.
Personality Quizzes
Personality quizzes can be fun for customers but can also help you understand your customers better. They allow you to understand customer preferences and recommend new products to your customers. They also inform you of changes in customer expectations, granting you a head start on creating new products.
There’s no right or wrong answer in a personality quiz. Rather than highlighting knowledge or skill, these quizzes are meant to reveal the personality traits of your customers. Personality quizzes are great at offering filtered information about customer personality traits and are, therefore, invaluable when it comes to designing marketing strategies or generating leads.
Let’s pretend you’re a vacation package provider. You can design a personality quiz to recommend the perfect vacation package for that customer. You can ask questions like:
What’s on your bucket list?
- Attending fashion week
- Scuba diving
- Experiencing a new culture
- Living off the grid
What accommodation best matches your personality?
- A gothic haunted house in the mountains.
- A log cabin in the forest.
- A penthouse in the city
- A villa on the beach with a pool.
And so on…
Based on the quiz outcomes, you can recommend a package to the customer that best suits their needs.
Trivia Quizzes
These knowledge bases quizzes are one of the best ways of engaging your audience. The user typically answers one question before moving onto the next question. At the end of the quiz, you show the user their final score and which answers they got correct. There’s always a right and wrong answer in this quiz, so customers can fail completely. You can make your quizzes as easy or difficult as you like, but it’s a good idea to go down the middle (moderate difficultly). If you make your quizzes too easy, then they won’t be particularly engaging and are unlikely to be widely shared. Put simply, if there’s no challenge, then there’s no pride in getting a high score. However, if you make the quiz too tricky, the users will leave feeling bad about themselves (they might feel stupid). No one is going to share a quiz they failed miserably at and risk their friends and family doing better than them.
