This post has been extracted by Charing Kam from our e-Book, “How To Keep Your Customers Coming Back”.
When it comes to providing customer service, it can be tough to know what to do or how to do it well. Even within the team, it can be confusing to figure out the intricacies of customer service for your specific company. Use the three tips below to ensure your team knows how to provide excellent customer service:
1) Educate, And Empower Your Team Members
Treating your employees well goes a long way towards helping them provide excellent customer service to your customers. Give them agency; give them your trust.
- Help your employees strive for excellence by developing a set of principles that tells them what excellence means for your company.
- Allow your team members’ personalities to shine through on the job. People aren’t robots, so don’t expect them to be at work. When you encourage employees to be themselves in a professional way, you’ll show them that you trust them enough to make good decisions.
- Invest in new-hire and ongoing training and mentoring.
2) Emphasize Listening To Customer Needs
No matter the reason a customer is speaking to an employee, the key to excellent service is listening first and only responding after the customer knows you’ve understood their complaint or request.
- Allow your employees to go off script. Empower them to personalize each customer support conversation to the customer. When your employees have to stick to a script, it creates a situation in which they have the same monotonous, conversations over and over again. It also probably annoys your customer, who can tell they’re sticking to a script instead of really listening.
- Encourage your employees to pay attention to the tone of the conversation. Does the customer sound confused, angry, nervous, frustrated, or bored?
- Emphasize asking questions before talking. Has the customer already tried to solve their problem through self-service? How many channels has the customer been through before they reached the customer service representative’s ear? How many times has the customer had to call or come in before? Find out about the customer’s experience thus far so your customer support team can prevent repeating themselves and sending your customer in circles.
3) Focus On Serving Your Customers
Emphasize the need for your customers to always come first. If your team members know the expectation is excellent customer service from the get go, they’ll likely empower each other to always solve for the customer.
- Everyone at your company should be able to identify a customer by their persona. Who is your customer? Why are they using your product? What are their pain points? Knowing this information helps your team personalize each customer support conversation to the customer and ultimately helps your customer be better served by your team.
- Serve your customers with educational content and easy-to-navigate customer service channels. Everything your company produces should be customer-centric.
- Follow-Up. Did your customer still seem confused or unsure at the end of a customer support interaction? Encourage your customer service representatives to follow up with the customers to make sure everything is squared away.
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