Great customer service often feels like having someone on the inside on your side, fighting for you. Obviously, a customer service representative isn’t actually working for the customer against their own employer, but when reps are empowered to fix problems, that’s the kind of customer experience you create. The benefits of a great customer experience are clear: when a customer feels like a rep was loyal to them, they’re more likely to repay that loyalty with positive reviews and repeat purchases.
That kind of relationship doesn’t just happen on its own. It’s the result of onboarding, training, processes, values, and technology all working in alignment with strategy. The processes give representatives a clear procedure for handling complaints, accepting returns, offering refunds, or handing out discounts. The values give them a framework for interacting with customers and being prepared for the unexpected.
It Begins at Onboarding
Before customer service representatives are trained, they must be onboarded: meeting their colleagues, being brought into company culture, understanding a company’s values. This often overlooked post-hiring step is so important because it provides a platform from which to build positive relationships with customers. If the right attitude is being modeled every day in the office, it will rub off on interactions with customers. If the workplace is a tense, unhappy place, representatives will have a hard time faking positivity with customers. That positivity needs to be authentic, and it begins by making new employees feel welcome and fostering a culture in which everyone feels supported in what can be a very stressful role.
It Continues with Training
Throughout their training, customer service representatives need to gain a knowledge of both processes and products. Processes include guidelines on when to escalate a complaint and how to address customer inquiries. Rather than providing representatives with scripts, detailed, standardized, and customizable processes give them an overall approach to or framework for interacting with customers. This is why living your values every day is so important: when working from a set of values instead of reading from a script, the employee will treat each customer as an individual, and they will feel empowered to make decisions based on the company values that they have internalized, making them more flexible in difficult or unexpected situations.
Detailed product knowledge is also important to great customer service. Employees have to know your products inside and out. Beyond being familiar with product features, they should be able to demonstrate the value of those features to customers. They must also know what your customers’ needs are and how a product can fulfill those needs.
Refine Your Processes
If you often receive complaints about customer service, don’t immediately sack your entire customer service department. Chances are, the problem isn’t the people; the problem is the process. If there are no documented processes in place, or if processes exist but are ineffective, customer service representatives are left to flounder on their own. Each one will decide individually, based on their own values or gut feelings, the best way to solve a problem. Take time as a team to review your processes, note occasions where the processes failed, and work to improve them.
Integrate Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is valuable to every department. It will guide every aspect of strategy: marketing, product development, sales, and, of course, your customer service strategy. It will let you know where your processes are working well and where they need refinement. You’ll want to collect feedback from as many sources as possible to get the widest range of opinions, from customers who received outstanding service to those who had a terrible experience.
With the right customer relationship management system, you can collect and analyze all of your customer feedback data in one place. Social media comments and messages, emails, phone calls, and online forms can all be accessed from this central location, streamlining data collection and analysis.
Map the Customer Journey
Not all customers are alike. Different customers experience your brand in different ways. They might have one set of needs when they first set out in search of a product and a different set of needs when they’re deciding between two or three different brands.
Mapping the customer journey gives you an overview of how customers discover your business and how they decide to buy from you. You’ll get a sense for all of their touchpoints (the places where they come in contact with your business). With this information, you’ll be able to create even more granular customer service processes tailored to customers at different points in their journey.
Outstanding Customer Service is Strategic
It takes a certain kind of personality to succeed in customer service. That doesn’t mean you can just find an employee with an outgoing, helpful personality and put them to work without any kind of guidance. Successful businesses are built on strategy. Part of that strategy is how you want to appear to customers. That’s your brand, and it needs to be consistent across every customer touchpoint. Well-defined processes are what give customers that consistent, positive experience every time they interact with your employees. If you want to deliver great customer service, you need to empower employees to do so by giving them the right support: clear strategy and values, robust training and onboarding, optimized processes, and the software tools that make their jobs easier.
