How to Sharpen Up Your Customer Service

There is no getting away from providing great customer service even when there’s a pandemic like Covid-19.

All interaction with customers plays an integral role in client acquisition and retention and brand awareness and reputation, all of which impact sales and your bottom line.

Therefore invest in a superb customer-centric service, starting with your company culture from the top down and your representatives on the front line. All company workers need to be accessible, responsive, resolve varying pain points, and put customers’ needs first.

So, how can you ensure your customer service is up to the task? Here’s everything you need to know.

Staff Properly & Elevate Your Training Program

Your business must develop a robust support process and use templates for every interaction from the first level of inquiry to after-sales customer support. Your business must also provide the right tools and resources so all workers can support your front of house representatives, and customer support team.

Training and Ongoing Mentoring

Delivering a top-notch customer service relies on the implementation of a strong and comprehensive training program.

Invest time in coaching and mentoring employees, ensuring they have what they need from your company to meet targets and get positive customer feedback and reviews.

Besides, you must keep your customer service department adequately staffed. An understaffed team will only lead to mistakes, angry customers, and depleted morale among employees.

Customer-facing teams will have a direct impact on your business’s growth and prosperity – whether that’s for the better or worse.

It’s your job to instruct, assess, support and provide feedback to your customer service representatives (CSRs) so they use their product expertise, patience, empathy, and adept communication skills to be problem-solvers.

Meetings & Staff Reviews

Establish regular team meetings to review product updates, and provide feedback. Acquire software to facilitate data collection and reporting. Don’t shy away from using channels like employee satisfaction surveys to gain pertinent intel on where your company could revamp or refine its processes.

Your Customer Support Reps Should Feel Empowered

Regularly motivate and empower your CSRs through recognition and appreciation rewards. When employees receive positive feedback and know their work meets the grad, and are valued, it raises their happiness at work and loyalty to your business. It’ll also inspire your team to set their own benchmarks to raise the standards and consistently improve customer satisfaction.

So, what are some ways to accomplish this?

Employees want to feel like their work is meaningful and impactful, and part of that can be achieved by including them in your decision-making processes. They should play a part in any discussions regarding product enhancements or updating customer service processes related to workflow or staying up-to-date with market trends.

Don’t underestimate the value they can deliver by attending cross-functional meetings or even sales meetings, as they will be able to provide direct feedback on what’s working versus not working with clients.

Implement Success Metrics & Continuously Measure Results

Depending on the needs of your business, KPI’s (key performance indicators) could include the following metrics for measurement:

• Total amount of customers serviced
• Customer lifetime value
• Customer health and retention
• NPS scores, customer feedback/reviews received

To truly improve operations, you should be measuring both client-facing interactions, as well as the happiness and satisfaction of your CSRs in the workplace. Keeping your team happy is just as important as keeping your clients happy.

Ensure That You’ve Created The Right Company Culture

Avoid overworking your employees. Sickness, burn-out and high staff turnover are indicators your company culture needs work.

To keep productivity and morale high, your company should have processes in place that help promote self-care and well-being among your staff. How?

Well to start:

Your leadership team should actively promote healthy lifestyle choices. There is a direct and proven correlation between regular exercise, eating healthy, good sleeping habits, and encouraging work-life balance and strong productivity and satisfaction among employees.

Don’t be afraid to prioritize mental health days and pursuing extracurricular passions. Even during the workday, time could be allocated toward professional development and skill-building activities.

This could be as simple as providing your reps with the bandwidth to take a coffee break, venture outside for lunch, network internally among their colleagues, attend a webinar, or you can set up team bonding outings or events.

If your company doesn’t have the personnel available to step up your customer service support, you may want to consider outsourcing those operations to a third-party provider whose core business is ‘customer support’.

However, outsourcing is not for everyone, so if you have the resources inhouse, the above tips will help you transform your company’s reputation for providing expert customer service which is sure to result in more sales.