As the competition stiffens in your industry, you want to do everything you can to ensure that you win over more customers to your company while retaining the ones you already have with you. A key factor in achieving this is the quality of your customer service delivery. You want to try as much as possible to ensure that your competitors don’t treat their customers better than you treat yours. You must ensure that your customer experience is the best in your industry. In fact, you can build your reputation as the brand that has the best customer services and the best customer experience management. To help you achieve all of these, here are 8 things you should do.
1. Ensure that your customer service representatives are well paid
Your employee satisfaction is important to maintaining customer satisfaction especially if the employee is your customer service representative. You really don’t want to have underpaid, unhappy, and frustrated employees attend to your customers. They might easily unleash their frustrations on the customer. Having to deal with different customers with varying demands and requests is frustrating enough, putting staff that feels undervalued and unmotivated in such a sensitive place will always backfire. No matter the disciplinary actions you take afterward, you could still lose one or two important customers. Plus, how many staff do you want to discipline?
Make sure your customer service reps are happy and well-paid people and you’ll see their happiness and satisfaction play out in how they handle cases with your customers.
2. Your customer service representatives should have the best working conditions
Apart from paying them more than your competitors pay their own representatives, you should also ensure that they work in the best possible work environment. You shouldn’t expect them to be able to perform their job maximally if you stick them up in a tight airless cubicle, with poor network connection, a malfunctioning computer system, bad chair, etc. you should give them the best possible facilities as they are very important to retaining your customers and as well as to your company’s reputation.
An ideal working environment will have a comfortable table and chair, a perfectly functional computer system, telephone line, a strong and reliable internet connection, a good air conditioning system and good ventilation, enough space to open up their bodies, etc.
Add all of this to a good salary and watch them work themselves off for your company.
3. Give your customer service representatives the adequate training
This should be one of the first things that you do after employing a customer service representative. Drill them with the training they need, techniques to serve the customers with, scripts to follow, etc. give them everything that they need to function perfectly in their role. Irrespective of their years of experience before joining your company, make them undergo training courses. This training should also be as regularly as possible.
Since they have to deal with all kinds of customers, from the respectful ones to the complainers and moaners, they have to learn how to handle the different cases. They need the right qualities and the right skills for this and it is your duty to ensure that they have all that they need.
4. Make all your staff from different departments work in the customer service department
All members of your staff should at different points in a year spend a while working at the customer service department and shadowing one of the agents there. This might be very necessary as other staff members have to realize how difficult a job the customer service representatives are doing and how the diligence or negligence in their own department make their own work easier or harder to do.
Giving all your workers this useful operational knowledge at the customer service department will help them do better and improve the quality of their work in the various departments. This then reduces the pressure on the customer service agents and allows them to work better.
5. Make your customer service representatives work in other departments
One way to help your customer service reps perform their jobs better is by making sure that they understand your business really well and how the different departments function. This will help them a lot in handling different cases with different customers.
The best way to help them in this regard is to make sure that they all ‘intern’ at different departments in your organization. Document preparation, delivery, quality control, and other departments that directly affects the customers should be the target departments for them. The knowledge that they amass from these departments and their understanding of the works they do will help them a lot in dealing with issues that customers raise.
6. Listen to customer feedback and take to it
Allowing feedback from your customers is a great way to ensure improvement in their service delivery. Positive feedbacks help you to know what you’re doing well and negative feedbacks help you to realize the areas you’re doing badly and need to improve at. You can use the information gotten from this feedbacks to train your staff.
Meanwhile, the customer shouldn’t feel that their feedback isn’t taken seriously. They should know that you see it, appreciate it and have taken it into account. The best way to do it is by replying to them especially through emails and other written forms.
However, you must ensure to do things properly. If you don’t have staff members that can provide you with professional writing services, there are numerous online tools that can help you with writing and proofreading such as essayhave.com, assignment help, dissertations services.
7. Your customer service representatives should find their job fun
You should ideally set up your customer service representatives into different teams. Newer employees should be mixed up with older employees while the strong ones work with the weaker ones. This will ensure that they can work together, help, teach, advise and monitor each other. This way, everybody is moving together and growing together. The work doesn’t have to be so stressful for them. You should devise other means as well to help relieve them of stress, even if it’s organizing a friendly competition between the different teams.
8. Promote customer service staff based on their performance
Customer service representatives are usually very hardworking people. So, you should ensure to promote the most hardworking and dedicated of them to higher departments. This can have some positive ripple effects.
Firstly, it can motivate other customer service representatives to work harder and increase the quality of your service delivery. Secondly, the amount of knowledge and experience that the individual has gained at the customer service department will definitely come in handy in other departments. Since they’re used to taking customer complaints, they have an idea of what the customers want and can ensure that is implemented. This consequently leads to fewer complaints from the customers, increased customer satisfaction and that reduces the pressure on your customer service department ensuring that they can work well without pressure.
