Excellent customer service skills are key in ensuring customer satisfaction and therefore encouraging loyalty to your brand. Put simply, a customer is more likely to return to a company that has dealt with their request in an efficient, courteous manner rather than one that is unhelpful and rude. Customer service is a skill set that can be learned and improved upon. Your business might like to hold regular employee-customer training sessions and role-plays to ensure that they can respond to different kinds of customer service scenarios. Here are five techniques for developing customer service within your business.
1. Know the product inside out
You might have been in a situation where you asked a sales assistant, for example, a question about a product on sale, and they didn’t know the answer. This might have affected your confidence in the product and inclination to buy it. So, all staff must know the product or service that is being sold inside out to answer customer queries and therefore boost sales. Enthusiasm about a product is important as well, if your staff love the product, customers will too.
2. Monitor customer service calls
A lot of your business’s customer service might be done over the telephone. If this is the case, you could consider recording and monitoring customer service calls at random to assess queries’ telephone handling. A service such as Kall8 allows you to record calls and generate call history reports for this purpose. These recorded calls can then be used in training sessions to go over the correct handling of telephone queries to ensure the customer’s complete satisfaction.
3. Acting skills
A certain amount of acting is involved in providing excellent customer service, such as having to remain cheerful and courteous with a difficult customer, all while you are having a bad day yourself. It can help to introduce a wide variety of role-play scenarios into training to ensure that staff feel as well-prepared as possible to deal with different situations. These scenarios could be based on challenging customer service situations that your company has dealt with in the past.
4. Use templates when dealing with online customer service
An increasing amount of customer service is now done online through instant messaging services, email, and social media. It can help to work off a template when crafting responses to ensure that all communication remains professional and reflective of your business’s ethos.
5. Personalize customer service
Though you might be working off a template, the customer must be made to feel like a VIP to your business rather than a faceless consumer. Address customers by their preferred name in all communications, both online and face-to-face, and use a courteous, sincere tone. Don’t forget small talk when engaged in face-to-face customer service; these small, friendly observations help to create a common ground between customer and salesperson. And on the other hand, a dedicated server that can also make the process much easier and secure. You might get repeat customers requesting to be served by a particular staff member as they like their conversation.
