Great customer service is crucial to any big company, as it both captures new business, as well as fosters existing relationships. However, often when larger companies increase their scale they are unable to maintain customer satisfaction as it is hard to streamline effective customer service and grow a business without the right tools.
The key to “great” customer relationships is giving your customers respect and knowing them like the old corner store knew you. Below are six ways to help any business to deliver a high standard of customer service on a national level.
1: Ask questions like you’re interested in what they did that day
It’s important for your customer service representatives to gather thorough details from the customers when interacting with them. This ensures that for future interactions other staff members are able to deal with their issues seamlessly, which helps customers to feel that their business is wanted by your company as they feel important.
2: Relationship management with everyone who steps through your doors
The reason you used to go back to the same corner store was all down to relationship management, they knew your name and where your kids went to school. This is a key part of securing repeat business with customers. The idea behind this is that you make them feel special with every interaction your staff has with them, as people want to know that your business understands what their needs are.
The next step in this is to continue to keep your customers aware of why they should carry on doing business with you. Here, it is important to train your staff to talk about new products when they are on the phone to customers.
3: Know where the chips are, and what aisle the milk is in
This may sound obvious, but how often have you called a contact centre and spoken to someone who doesn’t know enough information about the product they are offering. It’s incredibly important for your staff to have a thorough knowledge of your products so they are able to best help the customer.
As an extension of this, it is important for them to recognise key product features and turn these into benefits that they can tell customer. For contact centres, the easiest way this works is through a centralised communication platform, so all call agents have access to the latest product information, talking points and customer history.
4: Always be positive when dealing with customers
There’s nothing worse than when you go into a store and there is a disinterested staff member behind the counter. Customer service is frequently a determiner on whether people will want to do business with your company. In light of this, it is always important to have a positive attitude when dealing with potential business.
A “can do” attitude is often required. However, this is hard to train, so a goal in hiring is to find people who naturally have a desire to help people.
For contact centres in particular, it is essential that the operators remain positive, as often people are calling up with a complaint or an issue about your service.
5: Train your staff adequately
In order for your staff to adequately understand how to best deal with customer complaints, they need to be trained.
Other than personal experience, training is the best way for you staff to experience the situations you may encounter in customer service. Setting up a training program with “real-world” examples is often helpful for your staff to get the most out of the training.
Just as crucial as customer service training is training staff on how to best use the tool they have access to. In the cloud contact centre industry, call agents have access to everything from customer history to call scripts as well as product information. The best contact centres seamlessly use these tools to make customers feel special and add value to their experience with your brand.
Ultimately, implementing these simple strategies and making positive customer service engrained in your business culture is a great way for businesses to project a proficient image to the market.
About the author:
This article was written by John Palfreyman, CEO of ipSCAPE, provider of cloud contact centre software. Prior to being CEO of ipSCAPE John was Executive Chairman of the board and sat on the board of Macquarie Telecom. In this time he has helped the once start-up to become one of the leading companies in its field in Australia. John has been involved in the tech industry for decades, having seen the growth of internet, to the advent of the cloud.
