Link to article from Indeed here
Customer service is a company’s opportunity to connect with customers on a human level. It allows the company to show its worth when it comes to providing customer-focused solutions. Accessible customer service is an important aspect of providing goods and services—customers tend to remember how the service was. For this reason, having solid customer service training for employees is a matter of great importance.
While many businesses may place a higher focus on sales and marketing, customer service may be more important. Sales and marketing revolve around landing new customers, while customer service is about keeping existing customers happy.Happy customers are the best advertisement a company can hope for.
It takes a substantial degree of effort to convince customers to choose your products and services over your competitors. However, when people hear positive reviews from people they know and trust, it casts away any doubts they might harbor. This makes word of mouth a powerful form of advertisement.
Let’s have a look at some benefits of providing good customer service:
Not everyone is cut out for customer service, and some personality traits are more suitable than others. For example, if someone is disagreeable in nature, they may be more suited to highly competitive jobs that require assertiveness and a strong backbone.
Customer service requires a range of traits that you should watch for when hiring candidates:
Emotional intelligence is about understanding your emotions, so you can manage and use them to empathize with others and solve problems. Empathy enables a person to place themselves in the shoes of others, estimate how they might be feeling and help them to resolve their negative, stress-related emotions. This is a highly important skill for any customer service agent to have, especially when dealing with distressed or unhappy customers.
Being able to communicate effectively is paramount to delivering quality customer service. Without the ability to effectively convey messages, a customer service agent likely won’t be able to quell complaints.
Communication has several basic forms:
If customer service is face-to-face, presentation is important. The appearance of the customer service agent reflects the company’s values. Customer service agents should appear neat, professional and hygienic when dealing with customer issues.
Being resourceful means having the mental toolkit to find answers to a problem. There’s no shame in not knowing the answer to something, but that doesn’t mean a customer service agent should just tell a customer they don’t know the answer to their question.
It’s better to tell the customer that they don’t know the answer but will find out. Not only does this show the customer that you care about their issues, but it also demonstrates your willingness to go above and beyond to resolve them.
There’s no one way of providing customer service training to employees. Depending on the nature of your business, you may need to have your employees undergo training from the beginning or participate in quarterly, yearly or emergency training.
Of course, you can’t expect a candidate to know exactly what you’re looking for immediately upon hiring them. You’ll need to show them the ropes at the beginning of their employment. If you’re planning on hiring multiple candidates, it’s a good idea to wait until you’ve selected all of the candidates, so you can train them together.
This will not only save you time, but it also creates a sense of team involvement. This is a nice way to welcome your new candidates and make them feel comfortable.
Carrying out your customer service training on a yearly or quarterly basis can be a great way of testing whether your methods are working. For example, if you introduced a new customer service practice last quarter, but your customer service ratings have fallen, this might be an indication that it’s not having the desired effect.
Having a regular training program for customer service agents also contributes to keeping your team motivated. They’re far more likely to perform better if they know you’re keeping a close eye on their progress.
This type of customer service training is usually required after a customer service crisis or before a novel event. Something may have recently happened that caught one or more of your customer service agents off-guard. Holding a training session to clear up any confusion and further train them on how to deal with unexpected situations might be the next necessary step.
You may also need to hold an emergency training session if you’re expecting something novel in the upcoming days or weeks. Perhaps you’re expecting a rapid influx of complaints due to some fault or the release of a new product.
Customer service doesn’t have to be all about natural aptitude and personality. It helps if your candidates already carry all the necessary traits and skills, but customer service is a skill that you can train. Here are some of the most fundamental skills for customer service employees to have:
While some people naturally have good interpersonal skills, there’s usually always room for improvement. There are many facets of interpersonal skills that should be considered when training customer service staff.
Being competent in verbal communication requires having a good vocabulary and being able to use it. However, words are not the only aspect of verbal communication. For customer service, tone of voice is also important. To make the customer feel more at ease, customer service agents should use a soft and receptive tone of voice.
While often underestimated, nonverbal communication is highly important. Nonverbal communication includes facial expressions, gestures, posture and eye contact, along with personal space aspects. Having the right balance of each of these is paramount when dealing with customers.
You’ll want to train your customer service employees to appear humble and receptive to the needs of customers, employing the right level of eye contact and granting enough personal space.
Listening might be the most important skill in customer service. The ability to be a good listener helps customer service agents understand customer issues. Good customer service requires being able to listen intently, paraphrasing the problem back to the customer to make sure you’ve fully understood it and taking action to resolve it.
Paraphrasing is considered the secret weapon of customer service. It serves a useful purpose for both the staff and the customers. By repeating what you’ve understood from what the customer has said, you ensure you comprehend the issue at hand while making the customer feel they’re being taken seriously. It also generates a mutual feeling of goodwill between the customer and the staff member.
If your business primarily provides customer service over the phone, good phone skills are an absolute must. The key difference between delivering customer service in person and over the phone is that body language is not available with over-the-phone communication.
This puts a greater emphasis on verbal communication and voice donation when dealing with customer service issues. Providing customer service over the phone also limits the agent’s ability to read how the customer is feeling.
Without the information usually provided by facial expressions and body language, the customer service staff will need to develop higher sensitivity to reading voice tonation.
When companies are undergoing constant change, whether that’s introducing new products to the range or using new applications, it can be a lot for staff to keep up with.If you’ve recently introduced some new product or application, it’s a good idea to hold a training session to help staff develop the necessary skills.
Here are some suggestions on how to familiarize your staff with the new company update:
Assigning lower levels of staff with individual mentors gives them a direct contact to direct their questions to. It can be a good idea to ensure the mentor is someone from another department. This gives your staff members the opportunity to have a company-wide perspective of ongoing developments.
Having live demonstration sessions that include a question and answer period at the end can be an effective way of familiarizing staff with new updates. It creates an atmosphere of learning and can save time spent on providing personalized individual training.
Crisis management skills are crucial to providing good customer service. Being able to adapt and deal with unexpected situations is an important skill for any customer service agent to have. Studies have shown that 70% of unhappy customers whose issue was resolved are willing to return.
It’s almost as if the crisis itself is of far lower significance than whether it was resolved. Training your staff to deal with a wide array of possible issues can increase their crisis management skills by proxy.
Customers reach out to customer service reps when they’re experiencing a problem, so it’s reasonable that many of them might be angry or distressed. When someone is frustrated, they develop an increased sensitivity to conflict, making conflict resolution skills a necessary part of providing good customer service.
Here are some key factors for effective conflict resolution:
A huge proportion of your brand’s quality and reputation relies on the quality of the customer service you provide. While often overlooked and deemed as secondary to sales and marketing, customer service is the key to retaining customers.
Holding onto existing customers is less costly than having to find new ones to replace the dissatisfied ones who left. It’s just as important to ensure each of your employees have emotional intelligence and strong communication skills as it is to provide quality customer service training to ensure your customers keep coming back.
Roleplaying can be a highly effective method of training employees. It gives them a model of real encounters and a platform to practice their responses. It also facilitates live feedback that can be applied in real-time.
Absolutely. You’re the one setting the standard, so it’s helpful if you’re the one conveying the message to your employees about how to deal with customer service issues. However, if you don’t feel comfortable conducting training yourself, you can always hire a professional to come and assist you with the training.
Yes. Customer service training puts you in strong standing with your existing customers. This enables you to extract more value from them at lower costs.
