Due to the bad reputation customer service can receive, many people dread having to call their service providers for fears of such a situation, which can have an adverse affect on your company. There are two ways in which this fear of customer service can be harmful to you and your company. The first reason is if a customer has a need to call you but is afraid to, then you are unable to help them. The second reason is people will begin to associate customer service with bad interactions. This means even if you have a great customer service force in your own company, you will be adversely affected by the company that is making the news for bad customer interactions.
What can you do to remedy this situation? Make sure your employees are well-versed on appropriate customer service and customer interactions so they can ensure your company will be remembered for having good customer service.
What is Customer Service?
Before you can expect your employees to provide high quality customer service, they need to know what customer service is. Customer service is an essential aspect of any business and can be the difference between a one time purchase and a returning customer. In order to provide good customer service, your employees need to know the basics of what makes customers happy and loyal, how they can achieve customer satisfaction by meeting their expectations, and what turns customers away so they know how to avoid those practices.
Customer service is like most things in life; practice makes perfect and you learn from your experiences. But by making sure you and your employees understand the basics of customer service, you can help your employees build on those positive practices instead of creating negative ones.
It’s All About Tone
This may sound silly, but customer service must go beyond just the simple “How can I help you?” questions and dives in deeper. As Help Scout explains, it’s all about tone. For example, take a look at the two questions “Is there anything else I can do for you today?” and “What else do you want?”. They’re asking the same thing, right? Correct, but the two questions are sending across drastically different messages due to the tone used. This is where you and your employees need to remember to err on the side of caution with the tone used in order to create great customer conversations and positive interactions.
How eLearning Can Help!
Making sure your employees know how to be great customer service reps is essential to the success of your business, but the training required to get that knowledge can be difficult to organize. For this reason, many companies let customer service training slip through the cracks and decide it is not important to exert effort over planning, but if your employees are going to interact with your customers then customer service training is a must. If you find corporate training to be too difficult to organize, you should take a look into elearning.
With elearining, your employees can take the training courses at whatever time is best for them, completely eliminating the difficult task of coordinating a time around multiple calendars. eLearning can also help you monitor whether your employees have taken the course or not, and allow you to oversee your employees progress, as many courses contain final assessments designed to measure knowledge retention. eLearning can also save you money by eliminating the need for an onsite trainer and being more engaging to promote knowledge retention, which will lead to your employees implementing the practices they’ve learned.
Remember, if your customers are happy, you can be happy too, so try out a few of these great courses on customer service and let us know how if you have any customer service tips or feedback by giving us a comment below!
- Quality Customer Service: Customer Interactions Course
- Understanding Customer Service Course
- How to Give Exceptional Customer Service Bundle
Image Credit: Marcus Butt via Corbis