Have you ever wondered what is that most crucial thing any business has to do for ensuring that their relationship with the customers gets improved and he latter return to them for more? You may offer the best products in the market or may have a highly competent customer service team. Yet the sole factor that matter to your customers is their feeling about your company.
In case you work as a customer service manager, it could be known to you that your team acts as the face of your business. The experiences of your customers will depend on the support quality and the skill they receive.
Being one of the customer service managers, your ability to strive for both employee engagement and customer satisfaction would define your success. When your customer service agents are happy, there is a possibility of them going beyond servicing your customers. Customers who feel you care for them will definitely return to you for repeat business. To put it simply, customers can not be made delighted with disgruntled and disengaged employees. The success of any good customer service manager can be considered to be directly proportional to their ability to achieve both employee engagement and customer satisfaction at the same time. It is not possible to satisfy your customers with a disgruntled team of customer service agents. The next important question is how to make sure that your employees feel engaged? You need to ask the following two questions to your team members every day as a customer service manager.
- What are they hearing from the customers?
Such a question can act as an extremely important diagnostic tool. It is not an easy task to create happy and satisfied customers when you do not begin with ensuring that all your disgruntled and dissatisfied customers are removed first.
It is important for your team to understand that there is nothing wrong to allow your customers express their anguish and disillusionment and share their concerns with them. The team should not try to be defensive of a less than satisfactory customer service or even a bad product experience. When you enable your customers to express their feelings, you can discover fresh insights on how their experience has been with your company as a whole and the reasons for their frustration.
As soon as your team develops this mindset, they will definitely begin to have a closer tab to the specific words used by your customers to vent out their frustrations or describe their issues. Capturing or recording their words can help you to find out the problem’s root cause and can be a big help while the team tries to find a feasible solution.
Typically in all interactions, your customer should do the talking for 90 percent of the time. On the other hand, your team should be engaged in noting don their concerns, frustrations, and complaints. The exercise can help you in the following ways:
- Know your customers better
- Understand the exact language used by your customers
- Get familiar with the common struggles from the perspective of your customers
- Identify the issue faced by your customers
Such information is vital to have more delighted and engaged customer and offer better support.
- How can I help my customers?
Although many businesses acknowledge how important it is for their teams to have good customer service skills, they still have this view that they would have to incur business cost in order to provide service to their customers. At the same time, it is imperative to understand that an excellent customer service is somewhat similar to making an informed investment, which can facilitate business growth. Recruiting quality employees and making sure of them having the right kind of tools, training, and skills at their disposal allows them to show empathy to the customers and listen to them actively.
When your team does not have proper resources and tools at their disposal, they may not feel adequately empowered to resolve he customer queries in an effective manner or give an appropriate response to reduce their frustrations.
Although you would love to see your team member showing empathy towards the problems of your customers, it is equally important for you to take care of your team members and show your empathy towards them.
It is also crucial to listen to your teammates’ suggestions and recommendations and act on them accordingly. Conduct a detailed discussion on all their expressed views irrespective of how insignificant or small you feel they could be. In case they are eager to share their ideas with you, it could be quite important for them.
You should also try to identify all the training requirements, which your customer support members could be having. There are innumerable well-structure training programs on good customer service, which focus on listening skills, analytical and problem solving skills, and concentrate on polishing your employees ‘communication skills.
You need to train all your customer service representatives on a defined competency set so that they are well-equipped with the right kind of mindset, as well as, the right kind of mindset to handle your customers and develop a positive team spirit.
