Over the last 2 years, with the Covid 19 pandemic, many companies have had to review their approach in order to ensure their survival. One of the main things to consider for the survival of any business, is how it treats its customers. Customer service is a major aspect of any business as it defines the experience of customers before and after purchasing the product. your product or service. Additionally, with the endless evolution of communication technologies, you communicate with your customers using their preferred methods – text, chat, email, website, social media, etc. Customer service isn’t just about providing answers; Nowadays, it’s part of your company’s identity and brand.
➡️ Here are 5 key practices you should consider to improve your customer service:
1. Train your teams as much as possible
It seems pretty obvious to say that your employees need to be efficient, but how do you become efficient? The answer is training! Your teams should be carefully trained on the product or service you are offering so that anyone with a query feels reassured that it will be clear that they are in good hands. The more you train them, the faster they can handle customer queries, resulting in improved efficiency and customer satisfaction.
2. Patience is a virtue
Many of us have experienced unhappy customers who can often be loud, angry and vulgar. Especially since with the pandemic, scientific research has shown that “long-term isolation creates negative emotions […] and stress (Hawkley and Capitanio, 2015)”. As part of training, your customer service team should learn how to defuse tense situations. Staying calm, choosing words carefully, being honest, making customers feel understood and that you are doing everything in your power to help them – these are important things to keep in mind. The fruit of patience is beneficial.
3. Promote empathy
Now let’s talk about empathy and how it impacts customer service. In this case, empathy allows the effort to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. To do this, your team must be trained to listen. Your customers will have the impression that they are understood, taken seriously and that everything is done to meet their expectations. Sometimes there is no solution to the problem. Empathy will assure them that you did everything you could to help and it will keep your customer happy, even if the problem hasn’t been resolved.
4. Set up appropriate communication channels
Sometimes your agents won’t have the knowledge or skills to resolve a problem. In such cases, you need to set up appropriate channels. Your agents need to know exactly who they should forward the request to. Additionally, it’s important to remember that communication works best both ways, so if your agents feel like they need to ask customers additional questions to better help them resolve the issue, ask them!
5. Use a CRM platform
An omnichannel customer relationship management platform brings improvements at every level! By omnichannel, we mean a platform that can communicate with your customers via their preferred method while centralizing all data relating to each customer. This will help you improve your overall efficiency because with each client you will be able to quickly retrieve their file through which you will have a history of all conversations, problems and solutions, which will allow agents to better manage each case in a manner personalized.
