In my last Insight, I discussed why it’s important to create a culture of customer service at your company.
Once you have the culture part figured out, your next steps are to focus on the tactical aspects of your customer service.
- Ensure you have customer-centric work processes—Although your company processes take place behind the scenes, you still need to be thinking about how it affects your customers. For example, if you tell a customer she has to wait a week to get her issue resolved due to a certain process, you need to make sure that process is appropriately explained to her and have it structured in a way that provides a high level of service.
Something that might be efficient internally, from a business perspective, might not be something that is customer-centric. So re-examining your work processes to see if they meet your customer-focused angle is important for making improvements.
- Determine if your employees have enough knowledge of your industry—In order to resolve any concern a customer has and in order to troubleshoot for customers, your employees need to have well-rounded knowledge of your specific industry. This includes industry news, information, products, etc.
- Train employees to have proper telephone etiquette—Make sure your employees who are answering customer calls are using tonal voice properly and are able to address irate customers in a calm, compassionate manner and turn customers’ experiences around.
- Look to see if you can empower your service providers—This is particularly important in larger organizations. Customers are used to calling a company and asking for the supervisor because the frontline person either doesn’t have the knowledge and expertise or doesn’t have the authority to accomplish what the customer needs.
When you make your customers go through multiple layers in order to get their concerns resolved, you reduce the level of customer service they receive. So by empowering your call-center employees—through training, education and authority—you are ensuring that these employees can provide the highest level of customer service possible. This will make your customers feel much better about calling your company with their concerns.
- Make sure you have a way of measuring all these tactical aspects—Unless you have a way of measuring, you have no idea whether you are improving your customer focus or not. So develop some metrics, internally and externally, to see how you’re doing, and then reach out to your customers in the same way you reached out to them about their expectations. Find out what their perceptions of the results are, because that’s ultimately going to drive whether or not they come back to do business with you in the future.
- Put together some kind of quality assurance for your customer service—Reaching out to your customers for feedback is one method, but I always recommend having a system in place to drive the behaviors of your customer service providers to ensure they are pushing themselves and that customers are receiving a consistent experience.
By taking the time to focus your organization and culture on providing high-quality customer service, you’ll be on the right path toward retaining—and gaining—customers now and in the future.
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