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Service Blog

December 27, 2021

Hi there,

Catch up on your prescribed dosage of customer service with this week's latest and greatest content on the Service Blog.

Enjoy,

Flori Needle

HubSpot Service Blog

How to Ask For and Respond to Customer Reviews for Local Businesses

As a small business, your reputation is everything. If people trust you to do good work, you'll secure repeat and referral business. If they don't, your company will struggle. In 2021, your reputation as a business owner is largely determined by the number of online customer reviews you have, their quality, and how you handle your review management. It makes sense, then, to do what you can to generate as many four and five-star reviews as you can. In this article, I'll explain why reviews are so important to drive website traffic to your small local business, a few simple ways to get more of them, and what to do once reviews start rolling in.

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chief customer officer writing a price increase letter for customers-2

How to Let Customers Know About a Price Increase (Without Making Them Mad)

It happens to every business. There's been a change in your industry and as a result, the resources and services needed to produce your product cost more. Now, you have to tell your customers, who have been loyally standing by you for years, that you have to raise prices. You're probably putting off the conversation, worried about how customers will react. It almost feels like you're letting them down. After all this time that they've dedicated themselves to your business, you're repaying the favor by increasing prices? Have no fear. Most customers expect that the cost of their beloved products won't remain stagnant forever. However, if a competitor's prices are not increasing, this potentially puts you at risk for customer churn. You must handle a price increase quickly and authentically to ensure that your customers understand the situation and are willing to stick through it. In this post, we'll explain what a price increase justification is, then we'll review some best practices you should consider when making a price increase announcement to your customers.

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15 Ways to Avoid Burnout in Customer Support, According to Service Reps

Each day for a customer support rep is a new start, and though the cases are different, the typical workflow remains mostly consistent from day to day. However, support reps can go through some challenging periods of time — sometimes, things pile up, and reps can find themselves working through a tough backlog. Crushing the existing tickets while continuing to take on new ones can wear down on stamina, and the danger of burnout becomes more of a worry than it usually is. As a support rep, or as a customer support manager, it's vital to keep yourself or your team fresh and bright-eyed, so you can deliver the best service possible throughout the day, the quarter, and your career in customer support as a whole. Burnout happens, and it's okay if it does. Here, let's explore why burnout is so prevalent in the customer service industry — plus, learn 15 strategies for tackling burnout from service reps and managers alike.

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Qualtrics Head of CX Explains How To Use Customer Service to Improve the Brand Experience

Over the past fifteen years, most companies have been honing their customer service using customer journey mapping and optimization techniques. These are visual representations of a consumer's end-to-end experience with a brand, measured and improved at various 'touchpoints' (e.g. website, social media, emails, SMS, sales, and marketing team interactions) along the way. While this approach identifies pain points and ensures that no customer slips through cracks in the system, it does throw up a problem for brands – homogeneity. Every major brand now delivers the seamless customer service experience that 21st-century customers have come to expect -- yet these experiences all tend to feel the same. It's time to move beyond the idea that customer service is the sum of satisfaction at set touchpoints. Every individual customer has a need, a purpose in life, an issue, or a query, as well as expectations of the product and service. One size fits no one anymore.

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Ask a Customer Service Expert!

Every week, we ask HubSpot's support team to answer questions about customer service. Have something you want to ask? Submit it below!

What is the difference between a client and a customer?

"A customer is someone who buys products or services from a company, while a client refers to a certain type of customer who purchases professional services from a business. Generally speaking, customers buy products while clients buy advice and solutions."

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