The three most important qualities of customer service are often considered to be problem solving, relationship building, and product knowledge. Customer service plays an important role in attracting and retaining customers. Companies can take advantage of good customer service to boost sales. Empathy, good communication and problem solving are fundamental skills for providing excellent customer service.
Good customer service can improve sales and a company's brand reputation. According to Zendesk, 75 percent of organizations believe that a lack of transparency regarding the use of data will result in the loss of customers. Customers tend to spend more money if they feel special and the service is tailored to their specific needs. This, in turn, helps develop a positive brand association for future buying decisions. Zappos offers unlimited free shipping and a 365-day return policy for every purchase, following the philosophy that advertising money can be spent on extreme customer service.
Starbucks quickly replaces spilled beverages, and customers love seeing their name scrawled on the side of their coffee cup. Empathy is the ability to understand the emotions and perspective of another person. Delivering a good customer experience requires taking advantage of their mental space to meet their needs. It means reading the signs and anticipating what they want.
The result of empathy can be to treat customers with kindness when they enter your restaurant, to allow them to be reimbursed within 30 days, and to assist them in their decision-making process. Being able to resolve problems is key to customer service. If a customer contacts the company with a problem or complaint, the employee must find out why they have the problem and how to fix it. Resolving the problem at hand may require you to be patient and respectful while they explain the problem to you. You must have the right technical knowledge to help the customer resolve the problem and help them avoid it in the future.
Communication can take place in many ways, across multiple channels, and reach customers through in-person interactions, the instruction manual, and social media text. Effective communication is about using clear and concise language when informing customers about company products and policies, so that they feel safe when making a purchase and feel that they will receive support even later of the purchase. When talking to customers in person, body language should be positive, avoiding mumbling or crossing your arms and looking boring. Every conversation requires a listener and a speaker.
Listening to customer questions and concerns and responding in a way that makes them feel heard paves the way to a solution. The use of verbal cues such as “hmm”, paraphrasing and clarifying with questions are part of the practice of listening active. For more ideas on active listening, watch this video of the CVS customer service introduction course. As a customer service professional, you'll want to be familiar with technical and industry knowledge to help customers make informed decisions and solve any problems.
Representatives must be up to date on all product specifications, the purchasing process, the use of the products or services, and company policies. In addition, technical knowledge is useful if you are trying to sell more of a product or service, as this way you can list the features of the most recent edition. Customers want to be able to reach a company on almost every platform. Your communication channel may change depending on the situation.
That means your customer service needs to be adaptable. Sometimes, the same customer contacts a company through different channels each time. Integrating customer information with a customer relationship management (CRM) system helps streamline multi-channel inquiries. It also helps to adapt to the different backgrounds and personalities of their customers. Ingenuity is a useful customer service skill for solving problems.
Finding innovative and fast ways to solve the problem can reduce the time spent with each customer, so you can help more customers in one day. It requires being familiar with the different departments of a company and recommending clients if necessary. Developing creative approaches to problem solving is a skill that can be honed on the job. Artificial intelligence, effective communication, and more showcase the customer service skills that make the biggest difference for your company.
Whether you're a leader looking for ways to improve customer service recruitment and training or a contact center agent looking to excel in your position, it's important to know how to harness the power of technical and technical customer service skills. To improve this fundamental customer service skill, practice makes perfect. Conduct group activities where agents practice active listening with their colleagues. This can help them develop their skills and learn from the experiences of others. Encourage agents to give feedback to their colleagues about their active listening techniques. In customer service, empathy is the ability to affirm a customer's feelings and understand their frustration, even if the problem is out of your control.
In fact, 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations, but 56% say that most companies treat them as numbers. Demonstrating empathy is an essential skill for customer service. Empower agents to understand customer emotions and deal with difficult or angry customers. Share strategies and techniques for reducing conflict, managing complaints, and turning negative experiences into positive ones. For example, provide agents with a list of empathetic phrases, such as “I understand how you feel” and “I hear you,” and offer them a solution and steps to take.
Use the results of opinion polls conducted after interactions with the service to see if agents make customers feel heard. Adaptability is a basic customer service skill that means easily adapting to changing circumstances. Every customer service agent must be able to adapt to change. Effective time management allows customer service representatives to respond to customer inquiries quickly and efficiently.
By prioritizing tasks and effectively allocating time, representatives can provide timely assistance, minimizing customer wait times and reducing frustration. This is especially important, as service teams are often faced with a high volume of calls or a large influx of inquiries. However, 78% of agents say it's difficult to balance speed and quality. Today? Something as simple as the ease of changing channels also says a lot about your service.
Turns out, customers say they work hard to make 62% of channel transitions during an interaction (and that's not a good thing). Therefore, if you are a company that strives to achieve the best, you cannot ignore such a high figure that affects your service. After all, good customer service gives you benefits such as. A key way to empower agents so they can increase the efficiency of their representatives by 30%, as Gartner suggests, is through a connected agent strategy. As expected, this change excited customers and positive feedback soared by an astounding 137 percent.
You can organize personalized service experiences across more than 30 channels, from chat to social media. By combining data from everywhere, you get a 360-degree view of your customers, making you nothing less than a mind reader. Not only does an angry customer do this simply for the sake of doing so, a more nuanced emotional need is likely at play, and the task of a good customer service agent is to satisfy it whenever professionally possible. In addition to being patient and developing a thick skin when working in customer service, tenacity is required to get the job done thoroughly and precisely.
Provide ongoing training to agents on new and emerging platforms and the appropriate communication styles for each of them to improve the online customer experience. Try to provide your team with some clear guidelines about what you expect and some examples of what great customer service looks like in your company in a way that puts all of these skills into practice, and as you do so, be sure to celebrate those small accomplishments when you see people starting to use these skills. These changing customer expectations—88% of consumers now demand fast, consistent, and personalized interactions with every interaction—have an impact on the type of skills required for the job. It's part of what makes work interesting, but it's also the reason why agile, adaptive-minded people thrive in a problem-solving sector, such as customer service.
In fact, if your organization evaluates candidates' customer service skills, you'd be hard-pressed to find a skill more important than empathy. For agents, the most important thing for you is to work to improve these fundamental customer skills so that they can excel in their role. Whether you're looking for a career in retail or remote customer service, learn at your own pace from industry experts and earn a credential for your resume. Make life easier for your customers, your agents and yourself with Sprinklr's comprehensive contact center platform.
In fact, their job is to try to be the “rock” for customers who think that the world is falling apart as a result of your current problems. Not only does it provide current customers with a strong incentive to stay and remain loyal to their company, but it also allows for a more sustainable internal workflow for employees and agents. Customer service training programs should cover all aspects, from technical skills, such as the use of CRM tools and call management, to interpersonal skills, such as practicing empathy, patience and problem solving in the face of difficulties.
