Intelligent organizations know the value of customer service and the crucial role it plays in their success.
Great customer service drives customer loyalty and helps a business retain clients. If your company is struggling with poor customer satisfaction, it’s likely that your customer service capabilities need an overhaul.
To salvage the situation before it gets out of hand and affects your profits, considers if your organization is making any of the following common customer service mistakes.
Ignoring “mild” customer complaints
If your services are not up to the mark, your customers will complain about it sooner or later. Not all such grievances may reach you if your customer service executives are adept at handling irate or unhappy customers.
Whatever the level of a grievance, every single complaint must be taken seriously and investigated to determine what went wrong and how it can be avoided in the future. This calls for a robust quality control process across the board.
Denise Mayer from ServiceSkills suggests that anyone working in customer service works on conveying empathy and enthusiasm. If your customer-facing team is struggling to keep up with changing customer needs, a refresher course in customer service best practices can help them get back on track and thereby improve customer retention.
Hiring people lacking in soft skills
In a highly competitive marketplace, technical expertise is no longer sufficient for organizational success. Your star employees may be experts in their field but do they have essential soft skills such as emotional intelligence, patience, empathy, team work, ability to lead, problem-solving attitude, enthusiasm and ability to handle pressure?
Indeed, not all your employees interact with clients, but soft skills are also necessary for a harmonious and productive work environment. Anyone in your company that interacts with fellow workers, vendors, service providers or end clients should have the personal attributes required to succeed in a challenging, fast-paced work environment.
If your team is great at their work but is lacking in soft skills, invest in a good soft skills training program to help them grow and learn.
Failing to adapt your customer service protocols
You may believe that you have a good customer service process in place, but in real life, your customer-facing staff deal with numerous situations not covered in the manuals. So how does an organization deal with this problem? It’s impossible to preempt all possible customer experience scenarios and provide solutions for each.
The best way to ensure superlative customer experience is to empower your service team to make decisions that will delight the customer rather than please the manager. This is possible if your service executives feel that they have the freedom to alter cookie-cutter solutions when needed in order to resolve unique service issues.
In addition, every department in your organization should be trained to enable exceptional customer experience. Even the best service team cannot help a customer without the ongoing support of other departments such as IT, sales and accounts. When the whole organization works in tandem, consistent customer experience will become an achievable target.
Have you made these customer service mistakes?
