Customer service has a lot of buzzwords being thrown around by the gurus and professionals. When you run a business, it is your responsibility to puzzle out what they mean with their jargon. While some of them are self-explanatory, a majority of them are not. To make things easier, here is a look at several buzzwords you need to know more about.
Customer Alignment
Customer alignment is when your business focuses on customer needs and changes itself to create a perfect brand experience. This is done by listening to the customer and changing with their stated desires. This can be a challenge to do and will cost your company quite a bit of money. However, the result is increased customer loyalty. With the right tools, your company can keep up with customer desires and stay in alignment.
Customer Lifecycle
The customer lifecycle describes the progression that customers go through when they plan to buy a product. It covers before, during, and after a purchase. Companies can use this to improve the customer experience at each stage to maintain maximum customer loyalty. Starting with acquiring customers to convince them to become brand advocates, knowing more about the customer life cycle allows you to be more effective in marketing to them.
Voice of the Customer
Voice of the Customer is mainly your customer’s opinion about your products and services. VOC client feedback covers a lot of things and is not just a single item. It isn’t just a customer review but also an exploration of what your customer expects from a product like yours. Additionally, it also reveals to you how you can improve your product to have a better experience.
Social Listening
When you have a business presence on social media, you need to be implementing social listening. This is when you monitor the various social media channels for mentions of your business. This can be a revelation since most of your business mentions will not be directly from you. They will all be customer word-of-mouth. That can be important if you want to know whether there is a positive or negative buzz on social networks. This allows you to respond quickly, especially when it comes to customer complaints.
Below-zero Customers
Below-zero customers are the type of customers that cost you money. Regular customers bring revenue to your business, while below-zero customers affect your brand negatively by leaving negative reviews and exploiting your services. While they hurt a business, they can also be good warning signs that something needs fixing. If they go above a certain level, you should be paying attention and look for what is causing them.
Service Awareness
Knowing how good your product or service is important. If you don’t know the quality of what you provide, then you will be in trouble as you don’t know how your customers feel about your service. Aim for the Disney approach. Disney’s amusement parks observe their visitors closely to see how they react to the customer service. They optimize everything so that customers will leave the park happy and willing to return in the future.
Customer Value Chain
The customer value chain looks at how much value you give to the customer. Similar to the supply chain, you need to know how your company is giving customers value. The more value that you give them, the more likely that they will come back. However, you have to balance that out with the investment you are putting into customers. Over invest, and you will be losing money.
Growable Customers
Growable customers are those customers who don’t have much value right now. They might have made a small purchase from you or something similar. But their potential to become return customers is high. If you take the right approach, then these customers can become loyal buyers who will keep coming back for more. Identifying such customers to focus your efforts on them is pretty important as a long-term investment.
Benchmarking
Benchmarking is a common term and is mainly about measuring things. In customer service, it is focused on measuring the effectiveness and success of your customer service operations. Performance indicators like how many satisfied customers are there and how many customer service complaints were serviced are the main focus. The goal is to set target goals on how to improve your customer service.
Quickly catch up to any discussion about customer service with experts by knowing the relevant buzzwords. Knowing what is being talked about is important if you want to stay informed and be on track. However, the above words are just the beginning. Seek out more information on your own and become more familiar with the topic.