Create a Disney Park for your customers with great after-sales service

Consumers don’t want fake sympathy but real solutions when they are stuck with a problem. Companies who understand this never forget their customers post-sales; instead, they delight them with top-notch after-sales service.

As organizations, if you want to retain your customers and build a better brand, creating delightful experiences is a must. Merely responding to tickets or giving routine service post-purchase wouldn’t cut it. You need to go beyond and surpass expectations, just like Disney did.

How Disney Parks cracked the code for return visits with after-sales service?

“On a Disney theme park visit, a little girl and her mother came to a fenced-off construction site. To her mother’s dismay, the little girl threw her favorite Disney doll, Belle, over the fence.

When park staff retrieved the doll, it was in a sorry state, spattered with mud, dress torn, and hair bedraggled. Attempts to find a replacement in the shop proved futile: Belle had been replaced by a newer model.

So the doll was taken first to a makeup artist, who washed her and styled her hair, then to the wardrobe department, which made her a new dress, and finally to a “party” with other Disney princesses, with a photographer in attendance.

Good as new, Belle was returned to her owner that evening, along with a photo album that showed what a great time she’d had during her “makeover.” Later, in a thank you letter, the girl’s mother described the moment of Belle’s return as “pure magic.”

Once you read this story, you will realize why Disney Parks have a staggering return rate of 70% for first-time visitors. After all, first impressions matter, and Disney hits it out of the park when it comes to creating delightful customer experiences. They transform each visit into a magical experience making Disney Parks one of the happiest places on Earth.

But how do Disney Parks manage to build delightful experiences? What is their secret formula?

As a pioneer in serving customers, Disney heavily focuses on customer feedback, real-time analytics, tech stack and employee training.

If you want to build a Disney Park for your customers and improve their lives, note these lessons.

Disney didn’t just stop serving their customers post the doll sale. Instead, they went miles to make that one customer happy by recreating a spoiled doll from scratch.

How far could you go to recreate and craft a magical experience for your customers?

For that, you need to think about what happens post-sales and how to make life easier for your customers through excellent after-sales service. And to create a great after-sales service like Disney, a Unified-CXM platform can come in very handy.

How to build a great after-sales service?

Here are five ways a Unified-CXM platform can help you level up your after-sales service.

1. Get a single view of customer data

Contrary to popular belief, return and exchange requests – one of the most common post-sale customer service inquiries – need not be the end of the world for your brand. Treat them as opportunities to improve your customer engagement practices and experiences.

Having a single customer view — unified access to customer information gathered across channels and devices — allows your agents to view all past interactions with a customer in a single dashboard. Your agent can then offer the necessary recourse to the customer through a quick exchange or refund.

This way, they are not just able to meet customer expectations, which in this case translates to hassle-free returns and exchanges, but also mitigate the risk of customer churn.

2. Deliver omnichannel support

Consumers today are spoiled for choice. Guided by impulses and feelings, they don’t mind leaving a brand for a better shopping experience elsewhere. These shoppers, especially millennials and Gen Z, tend to engage with retailers on multiple channels, including live chat, email, text and social media. And most of them expect a smooth experience when hopping between these channels.

Most cloud-based helpdesks offer multi-channel support but are they genuinely omnichannel? That’s up for debate.

Consider a situation where a shopper ordered something on your website. After a long wait, the product reaches the customer. The product, to their horror, turns out to be defective.

What does the shopper do next?

You guessed it right — they reach out to customer support immediately. But usually, they bounce from one channel to another in hopes of a quick resolution. And by the time the customer’s concerns are addressed, they would have exhausted all possible means of contacting your team, leaving them even more frustrated.

However, with omnichannel capabilities, your agents can provide customers with the support they need on all communication channels. It also ensures your customers don’t have to repeat the same information whenever they switch channels.

By giving customers more than one way to reach your support team, a well-thought-out omnichannel strategy helps keep your agents’ phones from ringing off the hook, making life a tad easier for everyone on your team.

3. Deploy robust self-service options

The importance of self-service can’t be emphasized enough, especially during peak seasons when ticket volume is at its highest and first contact resolution (FCR) at its lowest.

Consider this scenario: a shopper has bought the latest name-brand soundbar for Christmas.

After they’ve installed the equipment at their house and plopped down on the couch to pair it with their TV, they realize the soundbar didn’t come with a quick installation guide.

Since they dread being on the phone with a customer service representative for hours on end, they whip their phone out and google the issue instead. They land on the product FAQ page. The content there, much to their dismay, isn’t beneficial. They try the brand’s community forum next but again, no luck. They’re in a bind.

What could the brand that manufactured or sold the soundbar have done better?

Before we dive into the details, did you know less than one-third of businesses offer their customers self-service resources such as knowledge base (KB), online forums, or chatbots?

Thankfully, the soundbar brand already has a functional FAQ page and a user forum. They must update their KB with the latest how-to articles to bolster their self-service capabilities.

Additionally, support managers can deploy an AI chatbot on the website — as their first line of defense — to handle customers’ most frequently-asked questions and triage tickets more effectively.

Another way AI could come in handy is by assisting agents in resolving tickets faster — pulling up relevant and contextual KB articles when agents handle necessary tickets, reducing average handle time (AHT).

4. Audit agent activity

Most businesses become short-staffed during rush hours..

Retailers are no exception. Since customer transactions are unusually high during the season, support teams bear the brunt of this surge in the form of high ticket volumes. Most brands hire part-time agents or outsource after-sales services to offset against the spike in support volume. Though this approach yields good results, it can also backfire.

As temporary or outsourced agents may not be familiar with protocols, they might require extensive training to get up to speed, which can take at least a couple of weeks.

The next best option is monitoring and coaching agents as they go about their daily routine. Observing temporary agents in real time as they handle a customer complaint can facilitate course corrections needed along the way. This unintrusive but proactive agent-customer interaction audit across digital channels can improve response quality, brand compliance and mean time to resolution (MTTR).

This benefits the customer and makes them more receptive to completing a post-sale survey.

What’s the big deal about post-sale feedback? Continue reading to find out.

5. Harness the voice of your customer

Customer feedback can yield valuable insights that improve your customer experience. For decades, brands have relied heavily on feedback obtained via customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys to boost their upselling and cross-selling initiatives and reduce retention costs.

But did you know a well-implemented voice of customer (VoC) program can complement your customer service efforts?

Customer service becomes cost-effective because your team can better understand customer pain points and tweak support workflows accordingly. More importantly, VoC can help you gauge the prevailing customer sentiment around your best-selling deals through social listening.

Take the case of product recalls. Though uncommon, recalls can hurt the reputation of even the most trusted brands on the planet. How a business deals with such a crisis that may have far-reaching consequences speaks volumes about the brand, culture and values.

Let’s say you work for a toy manufacturing company that manufactures Halloween-themed flashlights for kids. One day, you come across an angry mother's tweet about how the product has injured her eight-year-old daughter. This could be either a one-off incident that you shouldn’t lose your sleep over or a PR disaster in the making!

How you react in such a situation can significantly impact your brand perception, not to mention the potential blowback from unhappy customers.

With a capable social listening tool, you can analyze millions of conversations and reviews across social platforms, review sites and community forums. And find out if similar remarks have been made about the product. If that turns out to be the case, all you need to do is take the appropriate action before the crisis escalates.

This kind of proactive intervention goes a long way in building customer loyalty and may well turn out to be a valuable lesson in crisis management.

BONUS: Predictive CSAT

• Is your customer support pipeline choked?

• Is your customer service response time going down?

• Are your agents getting a lot of negative feedback from customers?

If the answer to the above questions is "yes," please continue reading.

Predictive CSAT, as the name suggests, is an AI-powered feature in Sprinklr that predicts the CSAT score, or how satisfied a customer is, without filling out the CSAT survey. As soon as a ticket comes in, the agent would see the predictive CSAT score mentioned. AI arrives at a number by extrapolating data such as sentiment, intent, emotion, intensity and reply time after examining past agent-customer interactions.

A unified customer service solution like Sprinklr Service addresses customer inquiries regardless of the channel or geographical region they're contacting you from. It optimizes your post-sale service workflow by letting you track your CSAT score and agent performance periodically.

It can be particularly useful when the influx of customer complaints can take a toll even on the best of agents.

• Generate 9+ custom and curated reports on your customers and agents for better insights.

• Raise timely alerts for tickets approaching service-level agreement (SLA) breaches to avoid PR crises.

• Improve agent productivity with a real-time quantitative and qualitative review of their performance.

Discover more by getting a hands-on experience with our free trial.

Find out how Sprinklr helps businesses deliver a premium experience on 13+ channels, using foundational AI so you can listen, route, resolve, and measure — across the customer experience.

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