Why Customer Service Needs a Unique Approach for Each Business

When businesses talk about providing an amazing customer service, they often cite the need for a “good customer experience”. And, whilst they’re not necessarily wrong, they’re not entirely correct either. In recent years, there’s been a gradual shift away from the need for a great experience in some industries. Customers are starting to favour fast resolutions over more holistic care. But that doesn’t mean that the need for a good customer experience is dead, it just means your approach to your customer care needs to be a bit more unique.

Experience vs Convenience

For some industries, customer service is still all about the customer experience. Consider hospitality or events (such as wedding planning). An amazing experience is integral to the services these industries supply, from the initial contact, all the way to the end of the sales funnel and beyond. They’re all about providing a pleasant experience that will stay with the customer for a long time.

These industries often don’t have problem-solution queries (unless something has gone wrong). The queries here are often broader and require a more personal touch. Customers for these kinds of industries want a service that’s more in-depth and they want to know they can trust you before purchasing. The experiences of others matter as well; 95% of customers will read reviews before booking a hotel because they want to know that they’ll receive a good experience.

On the other hand, industries like retail and logistics are more about customer convenience. The queries here are very often problem-solution-based. When a customer doesn’t know where their order is, or they want to return a faulty item, or their payment hasn’t been processed correctly, they want a solution as fast as possible. And that can often be at the expense of the “experience”, as long as the resolution is fast and effective. In fact, Zendesk say that improving resolution times actually improves the experience as well.

It’s important to identify what your customers mostly require and to cater to that. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be providing a good experience or that you can forget about your customer experience entirely. Every industry needs to provide a good experience in some form or another, it’s just about knowing when.

Pre-Sales vs Post-Sales

Although post-sales retail is all about problem-solution, pre-sales retail is more about an experience. Not only are your customers more focused on their experience and have less problems that need resolving, providing a good experience at this stage all leads to more sales. A study by Tempkin Group found that 76% of customers who receive a very good customer experience are likely to repurchase from the company.

For brick and mortar stores, providing this experience means knowing a customer’s order history from the moment they walk through the door, being able to predict what they might want to buy, or being able to suggest other options if something is out of stock.

This is all possible when you employ an omnichannel solution. When all your systems are integrated, your employees in-store can access information (such as order histories) that will help them with pre-sales queries like “do you have anything that will go with this dress?” or “I bought shoes online two months ago but I don’t remember the name of them; can you help?”.

But that also doesn’t mean you can sacrifice speed entirely; according to a study by Digimarc, 88% of customers want a faster checkout process, so it’s important to consider all aspects when planning your customer journey.

To cater to the speed-hungry world of fashion, a lot of companies are going online; in 2018, the worldwide revenue for the ecommerce fashion industry stands at $418B, forecasted to grow to over $600B by 2020.

But can you provide a pre-sales experience without human interaction? Once again, it’s all about implementing that omnichannel solution. Armed with customer data, you can build bots that can help customers, or even build apps that suggest items based on their order history. There are even apps that let you try on clothes before you buy them. For example, last year, fashion retailer Gap announced an app that let its customers see their clothes on a virtual mannequin. Similarly, Asos owns an app that allows you to search for clothes by uploading a photo of it — this lowers contact volumes for the company and saves the customer time and effort, providing a better experience all-round.

So, for retail, it’s important to provide both a good experience and a convenient service. This doesn’t mean you need to provide one more than the other, or that you can stop providing a good experience post-sale, it just means your attention needs to shift as the customers’ needs shift. If you’d like to learn more about providing amazing customer service, check out the first of our 5 step guides to customer success; this one focuses on improving the service within the fashion retail industry.