Best Ways to Deliver Consistently Great Customer Service
Your customer service is the voice of your business. It’s one of the few (if not the only one) departments in your enterprise that has direct contact with the customer. Therefore, it is in charge of your long-term relationship with the customer and your bottom line.
In order to do this, your customer service needs to be more than just efficient. It also needs to be consistent. This means delivering satisfactory results for every customer and over a long period of time.
How do you achieve this consistency? Is there a way to make the problem-solving of your enterprise more systemic? What can you do to improve customer feedback gathering, record keeping, and data analysis? Let’s find out!
Understand Your Product
You can’t solve problems regarding your products if you don’t understand them. Sure, people involved in the development of the product may understand it inside and out, but how much do your customer service representatives really know? A lot of people will abandon your brand if your employees aren’t knowledgeable about the brand. Unfortunately for you, this can be sniffed out with a couple of simple questions.
So, how do you overcome this bottleneck? It’s relatively simple – you increase your training efforts. Instead of just repeating the conventional “how to talk to a customer” training, you need to make it a bit more product-centric. Previously, we’ve mentioned people who were involved in product development. Sure, they may lack the time to interact with your customers, but they can definitely be involved in this training process.
Of course, they don’t have to know it all by heart. A database, a self-help center like FAQ, and similar solutions aren’t just there for your customers. There’s nothing wrong with looking up the answer. The key thing here is for you to provide them with enough knowledge to successfully conduct the search and give them a tool to help them find the answer as quickly as possible.
Outsource This Service
One of the ways to solve this issue in the simplest way is to look for virtual customer care, partially outsourcing responsibilities of this department. You see, the recruitment process and onboarding into proper customer service are incredibly difficult. Therefore, an agency that specializes in this service might have a much better shot at reaching the level of excellence that your customers require.
Running an efficient customer service requires you to hire and train people competent for these tasks, provide 24/7 support, and handle a ton of administrative work along the way. By trying to handle all of this in-house, you will sacrifice too much of your time, energy, and resources. In other words, small and medium enterprises might not even have the luxury of trying to handle it in-house.
Furthermore, you need to remember that outsourcing is a scalable solution to all your problems. As your company grows, the extent of these services grows to meet your needs. If there’s any turmoil within the department, all the problems are solved by the third party that you’re collaborating with. In other words, it becomes someone else’s problem, and you can feel free to focus on your own core tasks.
Human Interaction
While chatbots are tremendously powerful and efficient nowadays, the fact is that human interaction still remains superior. According to some surveys, about 75% of customers prefer interacting with a human customer service representative (over a chatbot). Sure, this Turing Test is harder to pass every year, but a lot of people are still able to tell a difference.
Things are even more complex than they appear at first. It’s not just about hiring an actual human to interact with your customers. People working in customer service for too long, especially those who are stuck too long on menial tasks, tend to lose human features (as a professional quirk). Sympathy, empathy, and compassion are, therefore, completely lost from these interactions. To increase the effectiveness of your customer service, you need to bring these back.
For starters, make sure to handpick people that you put in your customer service department. Second, point out this problem during their training process. Most importantly, supervise their progress and performance to notice this recurring problem. A lot of times, this happens due to overworking your customer service. To avoid this, make sure to either hire more representatives or combine other methods with your human customer service (self-service, chatbots).
Be Fast and Responsive
How fast you can solve their problems will often decide how satisfied your customers are. Just think about the contract (even if it’s only verbal) between you and your client. You provide a product/service, and they pay you in return. If your service has flaws or your product isn’t working properly, you’re the one breaking the contract. This means that while they did their part, you’re not doing what you’ve promised. You can’t allow this to last too long.
Second, if you act immediately, the effects of this problem may not become a major issue. In fact, the performance (and responsiveness) of your customer service may be so great that they end up more impressed than if there was no problem to begin with. Just think about it, before the problem, they either doubted or didn’t even think about your ability to solve their problems. Now they know for a fact what you’re capable of doing.
Just remember that it’s not all up to your customer service. Your entire infrastructure needs to be capable of keeping up. First of all, your field teams need to be skilled and reliable. Second, you need to monitor your fleet every second. In your employ, you also want hard-working and honest people, ideally people capable of self-evaluating their work and constantly striving towards improvement.
Record and Analyze Everything
Every failure is an opportunity to learn. However, you need to keep records of these failures as learning materials. While your customers can rate your customer service and leave comments, you might want to do some internal record-keeping as well. This way, the results will be more impressive, more accurate, and more trustworthy.
Recording these conversations with your customer service representatives is a solid plan. If it takes place in the form of a chat or email, recording is fairly simple. If it takes place over the phone, you want to record it and transcribe it in order to keep it simpler for subsequent analysis. Formatting this unstructured data and transforming it into something simpler for analysis is a much bigger priority than it may appear to be initially.
You would be surprised at how accurate some of these customer feedback instances can be, especially when you manage to build trust and credibility with your target audience. Nothing is too small or insignificant, and every piece of data can find its use.
In Conclusion
Finding ways to improve your customer service and maintain its efficiency is always a top priority. Outsourcing is usually the simplest way out, but if, for some reason, it’s not an option, you’ll have to increase your recruiting and training efforts, as well as your investments in equipment. While this sounds like a lot of investment, enterprises that are willing to establish great long-term relationships with their customers don’t really have a choice.
