The foundation of any successful company is excellent customer service. Once you have it, it appears to have the ability to unlock all the keys to success. However, delivering impeccable customer service is not always simple. Although it is a relatively recent initiative, many CEOs would argue that finding people with excellent customer service skills is fairly difficult.
The good news is that you can always find a great customer service team if you know what to look for. But it won’t be possible to go from mediocre to excellent customer service overnight. You’ll need an organization-wide effort, a group of top-notch support staff, and a sincere commitment to real transformation.
This article details how to set your business up for customer service success. Let’s begin!
What Is Customer Service?
Customer service is the act of assisting both existing and potential customers. It is to create a long-lasting relationship with the customer in which every interaction presents chances for a better, more beneficial engagement. Customer service’s main goal is to provide a comprehensive range of services, not just a quick fix for any given issue.
Another way to define customer service is as a certain job type or a particular set of job skills. As a job, customer service representatives must attend to customers’ demands and guarantee a positive experience. As a skill set, customer service requires many qualities, including empathy, communication, active listening, and problem-solving.
Today’s customers expect premium service to be integrated from the first sales or marketing interaction through the time they need assistance after making a purchase and back again. This is the major difference between service today and service a decade ago. Businesses must incorporate service into the customer journey at every point of engagement if they want to position themselves for success.
The Importance of Customer Service
Customers today place a high value on customer service as a significant difference between businesses and as a profit-generating factor in and of itself. And a company’s ability to succeed in business is typically related directly to whether it meets or falls short of client expectations.
Let’s face it: when 86% of customers leave a firm after a negative experience, businesses need to view every customer service interaction as a chance to win over, keep, or upsell new clients.
Providing excellent customer service generates income. Customers receive a comprehensive, integrated experience that is consistent with an organization’s mission.
According to a Microsoft study, 90% of Americans consider customer service when determining whether or not to do business with a company. Additionally, 80% of customers claim that a company’s experience is just as important as its goods or services.
A strong customer service team may help you draw in new clients, increase client retention, and boost sales among your current clientele. This is regardless of whether your company is well-established or just beginning to scale and flourish.
RESOURCE: How to Get the Most Out of Your Customer Reviews if You’re a Mover
Principles of Excellent Customer Service
The four pillars of excellent customer service are personalization, competence, convenience, and proactivity. These factors most strongly influence the customer experience.
- Personalization: Human touch is the cornerstone of good customer service. Customer service is significantly improved through personalized interactions, which also demonstrate to clients how much you care about them and their issues. Hence, consider customer service as a chance to win your customer’s business, as opposed to seeing it as a cost.
- Competence: Most customers may agree that competency is a factor that is crucial to achieving a positive customer experience. A customer support representative must have the ability to resolve customers’ issues and thoroughly understand the business and its offerings—basically, their competence increases as their knowledge increases.
- Convenience: Customers want to have the option of contacting a customer support agent using the method that best suits their needs. Thus, always provide assistance through the channels of communication that your clients prefer, and make it simple for clients to locate your contact information.
- Proactivity: The expectation of customers is for businesses to approach them proactively. Communicate with your clients right away to let them know if one of your products is back-ordered or that there will be downtime on your website. They might not be pleased with the situation, but they will appreciate that you informed them.
All of your customers will have a great, hassle-free experience dealing with your business if you base your customer service approach on these four key principles.
How to Drive Better Customer Service
Anyone who works to improve their customer service skills will benefit. For instance, strong communication skills, empathy, and active listening skills will make you a better employee and colleague. Additionally, improving your tech skills will make it easier for you to help others.
Here are a few strategies for promoting better customer service:
- Prioritize the training of support agents
The need for empathy, additional training, and increased investment to lower churn and empower businesses to understand employees with high-performing customer support teams. Consider creating a tiered training program that begins with fundamental technical abilities, such as product knowledge, and gradually develops your support agent’s knowledge.
In fact, organizations with high-performance levels are more likely to strongly agree that their agents are the best in the world and to have plans to expand their training opportunities.
- Identify and automate repetitive jobs
To save agents’ time and boost effectiveness, identify and automate the most repetitive jobs. For instance, using AI-powered chatbots to support agent workflows is almost three times more common among high performers, and it’s effective. This is because 67% of global consumers have used chatbots over the last 12 months. Research has also shown that chatbots are responsible for significant cost savings because it saves businesses as much as 30% on customer support costs.
Additionally, 61% of businesses anticipate that most customer support contacts will be automated in the future.
- Personalize every experience
Give customer-related information to agents beyond just the name so they can utilize it to enhance customer interactions. In fact, 72% of customers believe that agents should have access to all pertinent data.
90% of clients will also spend more money with businesses offering personalized customer service. And 92% will spend more money with businesses that make it so they won’t have to repeat themselves.
- Track and benchmark performances across channels
Most customers will spend more money with businesses if they can contact customer support via their preferred method. Make sure each and every channel is linked to satisfaction metrics. Monitor performance actively and compare it across channels to look for ways to get better.
- Concentrate on service impact
Make it possible for your customer care representatives to increase revenue through upselling and cross-selling, guided by a thorough comprehension of the client’s pressing demands. In order to make the connection between customer service and business growth more obvious, you should also create a separate profit and loss statement that includes the income made by agents.
- Integrate systems
Integrate CRM and customer service platforms to track customer changes and lifetime value. Transferring data between different platforms makes it possible to find tailored, relevant solutions to customer needs that could not have been thought of otherwise.
- Provide regular updates to leadership
Leaders of companies with the highest customer satisfaction ratings are aware of the value their customer service staff bring to the table. They are also more likely to closely monitor the impact on the firm and make the required adjustments along the way, in addition to prioritizing funding for customer service initiatives. To keep leadership informed of changing customer service goals and metrics, make sure that they receive regular updates.
Businesses that excel at providing excellent customer service have support from top to bottom. Leadership actively monitors performance and results rather than having a siloed customer service team. Moreover, senior executives’ salaries often have a direct correlation to how satisfied customers are.
Key Customer Service Skills
To succeed as a customer service representative, every employee who interacts with customers must acquire and hone a specific set of customer service skills. Without those skills, a company runs the danger of offering mediocre customer service, which could lead to a loss of customers and revenue.
Great Communication Skills
Your customer service team serves on two fronts and is on the front lines of resolving issues with the product itself. On the one hand, they will speak about your business to customers. That requires them to have a strong command of how to translate complicated ideas into highly palatable, understandable terms.
On the other hand, they will speak for clients’ wants and opinions about your business. For instance, it is not in the customer’s best interest to be given a detailed explanation of how to fix a certain bug.
When dealing with clients, the capacity for clear communication is essential because misunderstandings can lead to dissatisfaction and frustration. The best customer service representatives are skilled at communicating with customers easily, leaving no room for interpretation.
Empathetic Skills
The ability to empathize may be less of a skill and more of a character trait. However, as empathy is a talent that can be improved, it will be covered here as a customer service skill.
Being assertive and persuasive about the solutions you give without offending consumers needs skilled negotiation abilities, which are generally seen as a necessary talent for sales professionals.
When clients make requests that require intricate workflows and substantial customization yet add little value to the customer or your company, you might even have to argue daily. The skill of persuasion then aids in your search for the best answer that doesn’t damage client perceptions or reduce profit margins for your business.
Patience
For those in customer service, patience is essential. After all, clients who contact customer service are often frustrated and unhappy. Customers are much more likely to feel that you are going to ease their current difficulties when they are listened to and treated with patience.
Being as quick as you can to end customer interactions is insufficient. Your team must completely understand each customer’s demands and challenges and be willing to spend the necessary time doing so.
Effective Listening
A little additional training will help all of your agents perform their duties more effectively, and a simple place to start is by educating your team on good listening techniques. Turning up the volume on headphones is only one aspect of good listening abilities. It involves spending the necessary time comprehending a customer’s problem and then expressing your interest in their situation. Often, all it takes to reassure a customer that you truly understand their situation is to rephrase the problem on your own terms and ask them if that makes sense.
Collaboration Skills
Collaborating with other teams or departments is highly imperative to provide an answer to a customer’s question. Does responding to a social media post fall under the purview of customer service or marketing? It can be tricky at times.
For assistance with any incoming support queries, ensure your marketing team (if it administers your social media) connects with the customer service team. Agents will need to have great teamwork skills because everyone is accountable for providing excellent customer service.
Self-Control
There will be some clients who will speak rationally. Others, though, will allow their feelings to control them and come at you yelling and using foul language. Some may even make direct insults to you. These circumstances call for tremendous self-control. By maintaining your composure, you avoid inciting an argument that can go further and instead let the customer express his annoyance. Remember that the client might simply want to be heard and that this is the only way he is aware of doing so. After hearing what he has to say, try to find a solution.
Respect
Respect is the principle of treating others as you would like to be treated. Would you want to be ignored or disregarded if you were having a problem? Obviously not. The same is true for the person who approached you with a problem that needed to be solved. No matter how they are acting, you must always be respectful when providing customer service. Here are some basic ways to be respectful:
- Call them by name.
- Avoid interrupting.
- While they’re speaking, look at them.
- Be patient and give them time to finish before responding.
Comfortable Multi-tasking
The ability to manage multiple chats at once is demanded of live chat operators. This in itself requires talent. When confronted with a barrage of inquiries, excellent multitaskers don’t lose sight of the bigger picture.
Don’t handle too many chats, or your clients may have to wait too long for a response. A chat can always be briefly placed on hold if you need extra time to find the solution. But first, set expectations, just like with phone support. Ask, for instance, if you can temporarily keep them on hold so that you can do more investigation.
Problem-Solving Skills
Self-diagnosis by customers is not always accurate. Often, the support representative must put in the time to replicate the issue at hand before exploring a solution. This calls for them to understand not only what went wrong but also what the customer actually wanted to be done.
An excellent customer service contact would anticipate this need and may even go above and beyond to manually execute the reset and provide new login data while also instructing the customer on how to do it themselves in the long term.
Persuasive Skills
Oftentimes, customers who are considering buying your business’s goods send messages to the support teams rather than asking for support.
It is helpful in these circumstances to have a team of players who are skilled at persuasion so they can persuade interested prospects that your product is ideal for them (if it truly is).
It’s not about including a sales pitch in every email but about making sure that you don’t lose out on potential clients by failing to convince them that your company’s product is worth buying.
Product Knowledge
The top customer service representatives are well-versed in the operations of the products made by their companies. If they don’t fully understand your product, they won’t be able to assist clients if they have issues.
For instance, all workers receive customer service training during their first or second week of employment; it’s an essential step in our onboarding procedure for new employees.
Determination
One of the essential components of great customer service skills is determination, commonly referred to as tenacity. Tenacity is the desire to solve an issue successfully despite the effort it could entail. Tenacity is the drive to go above and beyond the norm in order to give a client a satisfying and good experience. For truly outstanding customer service, cultivate that characteristic in both you and your staff.
Time Management Skills
On the one hand, it’s wise to be understanding and give clients a little extra time so that you may learn about their issues and requirements. However, there is a time limit on how much attention you can give to each customer, so your staff needs to focus on quickly providing them with what they need.
The best customer service representatives are quick to admit when they cannot assist a customer, allowing them to refer them to someone who can.
Conclusion
You may go from offering good customer service to great customer service by honing your customer service skills. When you provide good customer service, you have happy consumers who may or may not go on to offer you and your business feedback or evaluations. However, providing excellent customer service encourages clients to give you good ratings on review sites and increases their propensity to tell others about their great experiences.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the essential customer service skills?
Essential customer service skills include effective communication, active listening, empathy, problem-solving, adaptability, and patience. These skills help customer service representatives understand and address customer needs, provide accurate information, and resolve issues efficiently and professionally. A positive attitude, professionalism, and the ability to remain calm under pressure are also crucial skills for delivering exceptional customer service experiences.
How important is effective communication in customer service?
Effective communication is vital in customer service as it forms the foundation of understanding and meeting customer needs. Clear and concise communication helps customer service representatives relay information accurately, listen actively, and provide appropriate solutions. It enables them to establish rapport, build trust, and ensure customers feel heard and valued. Good communication skills also aid in diffusing tense situations and resolving conflicts effectively.
Why is empathy an important skill in customer service?
Empathy is crucial in customer service as it allows representatives to understand and relate to customers' emotions and experiences. By putting themselves in the customers' shoes, representatives can provide personalized and empathetic responses, demonstrating that they genuinely care about the customers' concerns. Empathy helps create a positive and supportive environment, enhancing customer satisfaction, loyalty, and overall customer service experience.
How does problem-solving contribute to effective customer service?
Problem-solving skills are essential in customer service to address and resolve customer issues promptly and efficiently. Representatives with strong problem-solving abilities can analyze situations, identify root causes, and propose effective solutions. They strive to find win-win outcomes, ensuring customer satisfaction while also considering the organization's policies and constraints. Effective problem-solving skills enable representatives to handle a variety of customer challenges and provide timely resolutions.
Why is adaptability important in customer service?
Adaptability is crucial in customer service due to the dynamic nature of customer interactions. Customer service representatives must be flexible and responsive to changing circumstances, customer preferences, and evolving business practices. Being adaptable allows representatives to adjust their communication style, problem-solving approach, and service delivery based on individual customer needs. It helps them handle diverse situations, navigate challenging interactions, and maintain a positive customer service experience, regardless of the circumstances.
How does patience contribute to excellent customer service?
Patience plays a vital role in delivering excellent customer service. It allows representatives to remain calm, attentive, and understanding, even in challenging situations or when dealing with difficult customers. Patience helps representatives listen actively, show empathy, and provide comprehensive assistance without rushing or becoming frustrated. By maintaining patience, representatives can effectively address customer concerns, build rapport, and work towards positive resolutions, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
