Offering stand-out customer service is crucial for all businesses. After all, without your customers, your company would not survive. Customer service is rarely the most glamorous role in the company, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t as important (arguably more so) as other responsibilities. You can find solutions to improve your customer service but you should also find options to make the process easier for your employees. So where should you start? Here are some tips to make customer service easier for your team.
Use The Right System
The right management system ensures a quality customer experience and improves customer service. Using ITSM is one option to keep your system running smoothly while accelerating performance to boost how much you can offer during the day.
This approach means your team can serve more customers throughout the workday without cutting corners or rushing. From here, your customers should have their problems solved, and if not solved, at least escalated while the team works to find a suitable solution.
Provide Customer Service Training
The more your team knows, the easier it will be for them to provide exceptional customer service. Consider customer service training ideas to help them improve their skills, improve communication, and get to grips with active listening, which can make their customer service performance much more successful.
As they learn new techniques, they can provide a better experience. They can learn to de-escalate issues, identify solutions, and work with the customers and other departments to reach a satisfying conclusion.
Empower Employees to Solve Problems
While you want to provide a supportive workplace and are usually happy to answer any questions, you also want (and need) your employees to be self-sufficient. One way to ensure this is by empowering them to solve problems. Giving them (almost) free reign to deal with customers will improve their confidence and also shouldn’t keep the customer on the line for too long, which can affect their experience and means you could miss others.
Keep Customer Records
You can’t expect every team member to remember every interaction with customers. However, your customers may expect you to know all their issues and previous experiences, which is why having a system to store customer information is so useful.
This way, your team needn’t remember everything. Instead, they have a detailed log of previous calls and issues outlined in front of them. Encourage everyone to detail when the customer called, their issue, and how it was solved. This approach makes it easy to reference the customer’s history when speaking to them.
Encourage Company Knowledge
While your customer service team may know about specific areas, they might also lack broader company knowledge. Usually, this isn’t too much of an issue as they can find this information easily. Still, it’s always worth encouraging more knowledge about products, services, and policies to ensure they can serve every customer easily.
You can make this training mandatory or offer it to customer service agents who want to do more with their role. Whatever your solution, your team will feel more confident when discussing issues with customers even if they aren’t dealing with a problem in their department.
Provide Feedback
Everyone needs feedback to improve so taking the time to provide this feedback is a must for any business owner. However, you’re busy. You don’t have the time to listen in on every call. Instead, take some time during the training process to understand how your team provides customer service.
If you identify any issues, even something as minor as how they address the customer (such as saying mate instead of sir), highlight this to nip it in the bud and ensure their interactions remain professional.
Request Feedback
You can also find ways to collect customer feedback to learn whether the team is hitting all the right notes. Customer feedback can provide broader lessons about how your team is doing and highlight potential areas for improvement.
As soon as your team knows what customers are looking for from their customer service experience, they can manage calls and complaints. You can outline a framework to ensure they meet all requirements and the customer leaves satisfied.
Update Your Process
As your business grows, you may need to deal with more customer service issues. This point is true of any growing company and does not reflect bad service. It’s simply that you have more people who need help. However, you may not be ready to scale your customer service team, so what is the solution?
Many businesses use AI customer service bots to answer questions based on FAQs. You can train the bots to answer questions about returns or opening hours. They can also respond immediately to customers to highlight you have received their query and will get back to them as soon as possible.
Keep Your Team Engaged
If you can keep your team engaged, they will find it easier to manage their customer service responsibilities. Working on the same processes daily can become tedious, so finding ways to freshen the role up is vital. Some of your team can field customer service calls one week, while others can respond to emails. This approach can keep things fresh and helps them stay engaged.
Know When to Break the Rules
Sometimes, your team will want to break the rules for a customer. Perhaps the customer has encountered damaging unforeseen circumstances or their child went behind their back to order something they can’t afford. Taking the initiative to bend the rules is known as pro-customer rule-breaking and it can reduce customer and employee stress and increase loyalty. While you can’t allow this to happen for every issue, picking the perfect time to break the rules makes everyone’s lives easier.
Easy
You know that providing exceptional customer service is essential for your business. As much of a bad reputation customer service can have, these tips will make the entire process easier. The improvements can benefit your team to help them provide better results but also ensure your customers have an exceptional experience when communicating with your agents so they continue using your business.
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