What does that mean, really? Exceeding expectations? Isn’t responding to a customer’s inquiries quickly and accurately, good enough? Well yeah, maybe in 1999.
Used to be, Just responding was golden, as many companies tried to avoid customer service as a bothersome expense. Nowadays most companies “get” the value of good, responsive CS and using modern CRM systems, forums and hiring sheaves of workers to person call centers make a best bet effort to stay in touch with and help their customers. But how to do it better and in such a way that you amaze and excite your customers?
By using live chat of course. Being available to fix a problem or dole out information in real time is the best possible way to make your customer’s happy. Period. Nothing at all compares to responding in seconds and having a conversation directly with your customers. It leaves them with a positive experience, a smile on their face — lowers your churn rate, raises your signup rate and creates evangelists for your business who refer new business to you constantly. We hear this from our happy customers every day and it’s one of the things that keeps us working hard.
But to ramp it up a bit more: here’s another tip from the Olark playbook that notches up the game a couple of steps higher. At Olark when you click on chat box ,
you’ll get one of the Olark core team and not an outsourced, offsite virtual CS team. You might get Ben the CEO (if you’re lucky! — he knows more about Olark than just about anyone in existence), or Roland, Zach, Aaron, Nathan or Matt. Any one of our founders and/or Engineering and Dev team. We feel it’s the best way possible to #1. give our customers the absolute most incredible customer service possible and #2. for our core team to get to know and stay in touch with our users far better than just getting a weekly report that X% of visitor wanted ABC and Y% of visitors said DEF (those metrics are important too, of course).
We know not every company is structured in such a way that they can give out this kind of support, but it’s an important core value for us at Olark and we really do have fun talking to our customers and learning about you while listening to how you use Olark. If I was running your CS dept (Sorry, I love my job at Olark) I’d suggest rotating in some of your core developers and marketing people into the live chat queue from time to time. It’s fun for them, educational and the ROI of having a customer be amazed to be talking to the CEO or the VP of engineering or the guy who actually built the feature that they have a question about can scarcely be calculated. 
Drop us a line and let us know your tips for amazing customers when you use Olark. We’re always interested in learning new ways to set the bar high for creating happy customers and successful businesses. It’s what keeps us working long hours and what helps us sleep good at night knowing we’re doing the right thing.
Send your tips and customer service stories from the wild to bill@olark.com I’m always awake and always listening.
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