While there are numerous ways to delight your customers and have them rave about your service to others, here are my top ten tips for providing excellent customer service.
1. Set the Standard for Outstanding Customer Service
As the owner or manager of your business, you are responsible for providing exceptional customer service. If you want your team to provide a positive, memorable a customer experience, you must set an example.
Customers should be treated the way you expect your staff to treat them, and you should demonstrate how to go the extra mile. This will help your employees in remaining cognizant of their own customer responsibilities throughout customer interactions.
2. Give Your Front-Line Staff the Training They Deserve
Your front-line employees are the company’s face and voice, and your customer service operations should be built around them. They can assist you in defining your customers’ perceptions of your products and services if properly trained. These employees should be able to resolve conflicts and go above and beyond the expectations of customers. Additionally, they must possess endearing personalities that customers will remember.
3. Engage in Active Listening
It is critical to understand customer concerns and learning to actively listen entails concentrating entirely on the customer’s words, responding positively, and providing pertinent feedback. When speaking with someone face to face, body language and facial expressions are also critical. Active listening entails listening to comprehend, not just to respond.
4. Be Knowledgeable About Your Products and Services
To assist the customer, you must have a thorough understanding of your products and how they work. It is recommended that each customer service agent spend time onboarding with an experienced product specialist so that he or she can ask questions and fully understand the product’s ins and outs. This way, you’ll be able to assist customers with issues and share product tips and tricks to make the product easier to use.
5. Enhance the Experience by Personalizing It
Customers want excellent customer service that is tailored to their individual needs. Encourage your customer service representatives to make use of customers’ names and their buying history with the business; this can be accomplished using customer relationship management (CRM) software. When a customer contacts you, encourage representatives to address the customer by name and to be proactive in addressing the customer’s preferences.
6. Employ the Right People
Even with the rise of customer experience (cx) technology, the value of skilled professionals cannot be overstated. To enhance your customer service, you must hire individuals who possess the necessary customer service skills.
When hiring, keep in mind that customer service representatives deal with a variety of different types of people daily. Not everyone will be in a cheerful mood. As a result, you require someone who is patient and capable of handling a difficult situation professionally.
7. Strive to Exceed Expectations
Consider a time when you received exceptional customer service; chances are, the business went above and beyond standard service. When you strive to exceed your customers’ expectations, you increase their likelihood of remembering your business, referring friends, and becoming repeat customers.
8. Minimized Customer Effort
The goal of every business should be to make the customer’s life as simple as possible. Customers will always choose the companies that make customer service the easiest, even if the product is not as good. Keep in mind that an online purchase should not take longer than two minutes. Your customers want to complete the transaction as quickly as possible. Therefore, try to make it a reality.
9. Implement a Complaints Policy
When dealing with customers, things don’t always go to plan. Be proactive by developing a policy for handling customer complaints. It should include assuring customers that you value their feedback and are committed to resolving their concerns fairly, quickly, and efficiently.
10. Make Customer Satisfaction a Shared Responsibility
Is customer service solely a goal of one or two departments within your organization? Customer satisfaction should, in fact, be a part of everyone’s annual objectives to monitor, listen to, and engage with their customers on a consistent basis. This enables them to comprehend how their work contributes to the company’s goal of satisfying and delighting customers.
Each employee has a role to play in customer centricity, and frequent interaction with customers and sharing of experiences with colleagues will ensure that this is understood by all.
About the Author
Mike Sandy is a customer service consultant, speaker and author of ‘Simple Customer Service: 10 Ways to Keep Your Customers Coming Back’. Mike is also a staff writer at CSM, the magazine for customer service professionals.
