Excellent customer service is one of the keys to growing any business. Yes, the best way to ensure that your customers come back is by making them feel cared for. You can achieve this by ensuring that they get personal attention whenever they interact with your business.
That is why you should invest in improving customer care skills for every team member, especially those interacting directly with customers. Well, let us look at ways you can turn every member of your team into customer service pros.
Ways to Improve your Customer Care Team
Enhance their technical and soft skills
Handling customers requires that your customer care team has some specific skills. They ought to have both technical and soft skills, including:
• Product knowledge: your team, particularly the customer care representatives, should understand your product before they can troubleshoot an issue or answer the customers’ questions.
• Excellent listening skills: they should be good listeners interested in a conversation with the customers to fully understand the problem and help resolve it, hence leading to customer satisfaction.
• Patience: Your team should be in a position to handle customers’ who may be irritated or even venting. They should exercise patience with them and make the customers feel heard. This builds the trust of your brand with the customers.
• Empathy: Your team should be trained to put themselves in the position of the customer and show that they relate and understand the situation at hand.
• Good communication skills: Your team should be solid communicators in both written and spoken communication. This helps them in listening and responding appropriately to the needs of the customers.
Improve the quality of customer-company interaction
Interaction is the communication process between customers and your company team. This interaction can be in-person or virtual. Your team should know how to interact face to face with the customers, or as well as through tools like messaging and video communication apps. Ensure you give them the right training that covers the traditional and the new forms of service.
Beware of every customer touchpoint
You should critically analyze every customer touchpoint if you are to make it easy for your team to stay on top of customer service. Touchpoints are essentially places where customers come into contact with your brand. This could be through your employees, brand messages, social media posts, ads, and the likes. Ensure that you have your team covering the critical touchpoints in your business, plus it saves them time in queries.
Tools like your website and e-store should offer the right information about your products, services, and brand. This enables customers to stay informed in the absence of human intervention. Extend your brand’s availability by making sure that your customer care representatives are engaging customers actively through email and also live chat. In a nutshell, you should ensure that your customer support team is available at all touchpoints to attend to your customers.
Nail down a great customer experience strategy
A well-executed customer experience strategy will maximize customer lifetime value. It will increase customer satisfaction that will translate to conversions.
A good customer strategy requires that you master interactions through all marketing phases. These include discovery, initiation of purchase, service, and advocacy. Hence, you should get your customer care team to understand and create a great customer experience. Here is how you can do it:
• Attend to customer needs and use the feedback loop: Have your customer care team understand the needs of your customers by paying attention to what is being said on places like social media. That way, you can get to know how best you can package your products and services to meet the customers’ needs and satisfaction.
• You can also use the post-interaction and real-time feedback surveys, then follow up with customers over the phone for more and clearer details.
Embrace communication technology
Having the right technology is another way to ensure that you are offering smooth customer services. To ensure that the communication between your company and the customers is uninterrupted, you should ensure that your team has the right to support IT infrastructure in place. You can outsource IT managed services in setting up a well-equipped communication department for your customer support team. This ensures that you reduce glitches, which could possibly lead to bad customer experience.
Provide room for feedback
Good customer care service requires that you pay attention to both the compliments and complaints of your customers. You can train your customer support team to collect objective feedback through surveys, mining social media and web data, etc. Once you receive the feedback, do not hesitate to act on it and follow up as that builds trust in your customers. They get to feel that their agitations are listened to and solved.
Final word
Good customer services will keep customers coming back to your company. Besides, it will create a great reputation for your brand. That is why you need to invest in your team to equip them with the best skills to handle your customers. After all, you are in business to convert as many customers as you can!