Guest Post: 4 Customer Service Best Practices for Your Subscription Business

Doug Liantonio is the Marketing Outreach Analyst at Gravy Solutions, a company that helps subscription-based businesses recover failed payments and retain customers. He shares four customer service methods for your subscription-based business that will help you boost your reputation, increase customer satisfaction, and improve overall business health.

From afar, customer service seems like it should be simple. Just answer any questions your customers may have. Right?  

With any experience in customer service, you understand it’s far from simple — especially as the business grows and the number of customers increases. 

While trying to keep up with the demand, it can be easy to fall into customer service methods that aren’t effective. 

But because your customer service hugely impacts brand reputation, it should be treated with intentionality and delicacy that reflects that. Here are four customer service methods for your subscription-based business that will help you boost your reputation, increase customer satisfaction, and improve overall business health: 

1. Lead with Empathy

 Behind every subscription is a person.  

As a business owner, it’s shockingly easy to forget that. You start looking at revenue and number of subscribers and forget that every single one of those data points is influenced by the people buying from your brand. 

As a customer service agent, it’s easy to fall into the trap of answered calls and answered chat tickets.  

But they’re people. 

That’s why it’s vital to lead with empathy when providing effective customer service. Whether someone uses a negative or positive tone in speaking with you, remember they’re reaching out because they’re experiencing a problem, they’re confused about how to do something, or they need another form of help. 

 You have the opportunity to hear their unique situation and offer them an empathetic solution — even if their tone isn’t so nice. 

People have bad days. People get frustrated. No matter what the circumstances are, always offer sympathetic, human-first customer service. 

2. Ditch Automation

Because customer service works best when centered on empathy, automation shouldn’t be your main form of customer service. In fact, it should be a very small part. 

Based on research done by Gravy, 92.2% of customers reported satisfaction from speaking with a human, while only 45.18% reported satisfaction from talking to a bot. 

Why? Well, in part, because of empathy. Robots can’t understand people the way other humans do. They don’t and can’t show the same care toward extenuating circumstances a customer may be facing. 

For that reason, while automation can be a cost-effective and simpler customer service method for companies, it’s costly in the long term.  

Chances are you’re losing customers due to unresolved or poorly resolved complaints and the low customer satisfaction associated with bots. 

With that being said, opt to only use automation where absolutely necessary. It will make sense to send a certain number of automated emails and messages, but that shouldn’t be your main method of communicating with customers looking for solutions. 

3. Make Note of Feedback

Receiving negative customer queries can be tough on morale and drain your energy. However, you can turn these negative communications into positives. 

 Whenever you receive feedback from a customer (good or bad — but especially when it’s bad), make note of it.  

Over time, you’ll likely start to see common themes among these comments. When a trend emerges in your customer feedback, leverage this data to make improvements to your product or service.  

Analyzing this feedback creates the perfect opportunity to actually improve your business as well as customer satisfaction. 

In other words, a dissatisfied customer now allows you to make improvements for a number of happy customers in the future. 

Don’t let this opportunity go to waste. 

4. Be Accessible

Every time a customer reaches out to your team with a question or concern it’s an opportunity for you to build trust in your company, improve customer satisfaction, and possibly even prevent customer churn. 

That’s why it’s critical reaching your customer support team is easy and accessible. If you offer customer service via the phone, don’t leave your customer on hold for 20 minutes. For emails, respond quicker than 48 hours.  

To make finding the answers your customers need even easier, provide an FAQ page in the support section of your website. This will hopefully help free up some of your team’s bandwidth by solving issues before a customer even needs to contact you. Plus, the customer will be pleased finding an answer was a quick and simple process. 

If a customer can’t reach a person to speak to about their issue, it builds up distrust and resentment. When this happens and a customer doesn’t feel cared for, you’ll likely lose their business either immediately or down the line. 

Conclusion 

Your customer service greatly contributes to the overall health of your business. When you’re failing to address customer concerns and provide an open line of communication, you risk losing customers due to dissatisfaction.  

That’s why leveraging empathy, reducing automated communication in favor of human-to-human contact, accepting and implementing feedback, as well as being accessible will greatly improve your subscription company. 

Doug Liantonio is the Marketing Outreach Analyst at Gravy Solutions, a company that helps subscription-based businesses recover failed payments and retain customers.