STARTING FROM SCRATCH

Answering a Classic Question: What is Customer Service?

We’ve asked this question ourselves – and we all have our own answers. Customer Service can be defined as the act of providing excellent support to customers before, during, and after the customer buys a product/service, ensuring satisfaction and promoting repeat business. Breaking it down to basics, it is all about meeting and exceeding the customer’s needs at every point along the customer journey.

Why Excellent Customer Service Matters

Customers are the lifeblood of any business. Taking care of your customers is an absolute necessity as this will directly affect how your business will turn out in the future. The benefits of ensuring excellent customer service outweigh any cost and are worth investing in. Here are some of what you gain by providing excellent customer service:

• Improved customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Make a one-time sale into a repeat business
• Transform disengaged customers to loyal followers
• Create brand ambassadors out of your customers
• Elevate your business above your competition
• Enhance your brand image and reputation

Great Customer Service – What does it look like?

As a customer, you’d think that good service is simply meeting the basics: an answer to a question here, giving a link for more information there, meeting expectations. But that doesn’t leave an impression, does it? What we remember is not just good service – what sticks is what leaves us in awe: fast, reliable, available. We want it GREAT.

Thinking about what makes customer service great can be pretty straightforward, but there’s more to it than what meets the eye; in reality, there are a lot of things that can differentiate good from great service. You feel GREAT when:

• You’ve been thoroughly listened to
• The root of your problem is identified and is resolved in a timely manner
• You feel that you are cared for and that your time is important
• You feel engaged and positive after each interaction with your favorite brand
• You feel that it’s easy to do business with your favorite brand
• You want to share your positive experience with your family and friends

These are the things that you’d want for yourself – and these are what you’d want your customers to feel about your brand, product, or service. There are no downsides in providing great service. Building your service culture around this idea will strengthen your foundation and brand identity.

Customer Service Skills 101 – Equipping Your Team

Remember the times when you got off the phone conversation with a customer service representative or left a chat session with a support specialist where you felt great right after? Your concerns were resolved in a timely manner, you found it easy to work with your favorite brand, and you felt positive about it that you’d want to share it via social media. These experiences probably left a lasting impression – and if they did, then the person you spoke or chatted with did something right. Achieving these three things is the “Gold Standard” that every customer service specialist or team should aim for and achieve.

 

At one point, you’ve probably thought “How do they do it?” There are a lot of guides, tips, strategies – or “hacks” out there on how to provide great customer service – but it all boils down to a solid leadership, proper training, and the right skills. Equipping your team with the right customer service skills should be your number one priority. Here is a list of skills, tools, and traits (in no particular order) that you’d want your team to possess or learn over time:

 

1. Product Knowledge – the most basic, and perhaps one of the most important tools for your team is basic knowledge about your business. Making sure that your team is updated with your latest product specs or your new refund process will enable them to answer customer questions efficiently.

 

2. Clear Communication Skills – this is a given, but it is surprising how a lot of customers struggle to communicate with customer service team members. According to a study by Salesforce, 33% of their clients say that efficiently answering questions is the most important skill that a customer service agent can have. Stammering, rambling, or any form of unclear language can be the cause of negative customer experience.

 

3. Empathy – No customer service arsenal is ever complete without empathy. The classic definition is “the ability to understand another person’s emotions and to understand their point of view.” Despite our long journey of evolution and the development of abstract thought and critical thinking, we, humans still rely heavily on emotions when making decisions. This is why empathy is such a critical skill: customer service representatives who can connect with their customers and clients emotionally are the ones who leave a lasting impression.

 

Our modern take on empathy is approaching problems in multiple perspectives to generate creative solutions. This approach involves looking at different perspectives like who your customers are, understanding their struggles, connecting with them emotionally, and “speaking” their language. Being able to connect with your customers emotionally helps you tailor-fit solutions and resolve concerns positively.

 

4. Effective Listening and Comprehension – hearing what customers are saying or simply reading what they’re getting across an e-mail or a chat message is never enough. Your customer service team must be able to fully concentrate, understand, respond and then remember what customers are saying. Active listening and comprehension will help you to fully grasp the totality of a customer’s concern (e.g. what is explicit,  implicit, and all other details that can be easily missed without applying this skill).

 

5. Persuasion & Positivity – You have the knowledge, you’re able to speak clearly, you can empathize, and you’re a good listener; that’s good, but all of those other skills can’t be properly optimized without a little persuasion and positivity. There’s always a big chance that if a customer contacts you, he or she has a problem. Remember that connecting with your customers emotionally lets you control the pace of a conversation – so despite all the aggression and frustration a customer throws at you, steer the conversation toward a positive outcome with use of positive language. Focus on the solution. Thank them for their patience, understanding, and valued loyalty.

 

6. Patience & Self Control – Great customer service representatives make it look and sound easy when they deliver, but the reality is customer service operations are tough. According to a study by Salesforce, one-third of their customers say that “they’d rather clean a toilet than speak with customer service.” This is the reality that many agents unfairly face every single day. Your team members will be insulted, shouted at, and rudely rushed. It’s like a choice between a box of chocolates or Russian Roulette: you don’t know what you’ll get next. This is where patience and self-control come in. Train your team on how to manage volatile environments – to maintain self-control even when your customers don’t. Help them cultivate patience and realize that a customer’s anger is not directed towards them and that every day, they have the chance to turn every negative encounter into a positive one.

 

7. Time Management – time is perhaps the most limited resource, and all we can do is to manage it properly. Without this skill, it is so easy to give in to the simplest of distractions: letting that phone ring a few extra times; letting an e-mail or live chat session sit there for a few more minutes; smoking that last cigarette after saying the same of the previous one. Allowing yourselves these small pleasures all the time can mean bad news for your business.

 

According to a Global Survey by LivePerson, eighty-three percent of online shoppers will abandon a purchase or take their business elsewhere if they aren’t helped within five minutes. Missing that live chat message without a follow-up or a customer’s call sitting on a queue for too long could mean a lot of missed opportunities (and possibly negative social media reviews). Mitigate these scenarios by prioritizing quick response times, streamline processes to reduce time on gathering customer information and documenting cases or tickets. Good time management can give you and your team enough time to do your daily tasks and promote work-life balance