5 Strategies To Improve Your Customer Service Performance
One of the determinants of a company’s profitability is improving customer service performance. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that customer service representatives are brand emissaries. Thus, providing a formidable customer experience is vital for career-building and your customers. A low satisfaction level reflects terrible customer service, which can cost a lot of money and your business’ success.
Happily, you can try to improve your team’s performance by using some specific tactics. So let’s dive in.
1. Above all, understand customer needs
Spoiler alert: a business is nothing but skin and bones without its customers. The customer’s needs are the basis of your customer service strategy.
The question arises here: How to understand the customer needs to give the people what they want? First and foremost, it’s essential to understand the definition of customers’ needs. They are physical motivators and psychological ones that prompt customers to buy a specific product or service.
At the bottom of the pyramid are physical needs which are easier to identify because they have a direct cause. For example, if you are hungry, you will get something to eat. However, the decision-making forces are psychological needs. Despite any competition, they guide the customer to choose one brand or another.
But things get slightly slippery for marketers and business owners. Studying customers’ behavior or using some findings can help you identify and meet psychological needs. Make use of customer interviews, focus groups, and surveys. In this way, you will know what your customers’ needs are.
2. Honest customer feedback – gold dust to businesses
You must encourage honest customer feedback to empower your company with in-depth knowledge of your customers’ decision-making choices.
Even though most customers do not want to voice their positive or negative opinions, there is a huge need to encourage this action. So how do you overcome this hurdle?
Feedback boxes
One of the most effective methods of data response collection is physical feedback boxes.
The center point of a feedback box is to get feedback from users about different aspects. That’s why it’s essential to make it as simple and easy to use as possible. It also should be secure in that only authorized personnel can open it and read the notes forwarded by clients.
Hint: feedback boxes are not complaint boxes. Positive client experiences are as meaningful as negative ones. Assessing and recognizing them reflect your promptitude and professionalism.
Collecting customer feedback over social media can help you improve your products and services. Because social media makes one’s opinion known to the rest of the world, it’s the best place to engage your customers. Take notice of the fact that around 2.82 billion people use social media. Thus you can make a killing in collecting feedback on various social media platforms.
Take advantage of any social media tool, such as distributing surveys, asking directly for feedback, posting an autoresponder, or using the poll to ask which product or service customers prefer.
Social Media
Collecting customer feedback over social media can help you improve your products and services. Because social media makes one’s opinion known to the rest of the world, it’s the best place to engage your customers. Take notice of the fact that around 2.82 billion people use social media. Thus you can make a killing in collecting feedback on various social media platforms.
Take advantage of any social media tool, such as distributing surveys, asking directly for feedback, posting an autoresponder, or using the poll to ask which product or service customers prefer.
Focus Groups
Focus groups can provide helpful feedback because it measures the potential impact of a new product. There also exists a fundamental disadvantage: the organization must have a bigger budget. But despite this, focus groups can be replicated across different geographical locations to gather more representative responses.
Maybe you’ve asked yourself how to conduct it? Well, it’s not that hard. Follow these steps and nothing simpler than that:
Step 1: Recruit the right participants
Step 2: Choose a moderator
Step 3: Record the meeting for future purposes
Step 4: Write clear discussion guidelines
Step 5: Conduct the session and generate a report
Step 6: Use the data to make a plan of action
Consequently, you will quickly identify customers’ feelings, perceptions, and thoughts about any specific product or service.
3. Set individual and team goals
Although team goals help employees evolve to a more effective and synergic team, setting team goals can be challenging. The whole process can take time, but the first step you have to take is identifying what you want to achieve. Either you start by establishing targets you would like your business to reach over the next period, or you can by examining where your business is lacking and setting a goal to shore up this deficit.
Take into consideration the SMART framework. In other words, set specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-related goals. General goals such as ‘enjoy your time working’ ‘enjoy life more’ look more like ambitions, being too subjective, and are good-for-nothing in this case. Every time you set an individual and team goal, assign it a target number. In this way, you can see efficiently whether your team has achieved its goals or not.
Hint: Team goals should be set first and individual goals after. You want to ensure that everyone is working to further the aims of the business as a whole, so it is wiser to set personal goals under the umbrella of a team goal.
Also, once you have set your team goal, help your team with their responsibilities. Of course, you can help your team throughout the process. Be there for them and build together achievable and actionable goals.
4. Set customer service standards
Undoubtedly, service standards are essential for customers, or even potential customers, employees, and business management. That’s why the definition of customer service standards is based on words like timeliness, accuracy, appropriateness.
TIMELINESS
One of the most crucial customer service standards is readily reacting to needs or requests and consistently communicating progress. Never stop sharing the steps in the process and what the customer expects until the item resolves.
ACCURACY
Providing correct information to customers is imperative. Receiving inaccurate information could be frustrating. People not only make decisions but also act upon the information they receive. So keep it simple. Make policies, products, processes simple for both the customers and employees. You will avoid miscommunications and misunderstandings.
APPROPRIATENESS
When a customer has a problem, try to answer the question and not beat around the bush. Ensuring that the customers’ expectations have been met means appropriateness. In an intercultural context, achieving appropriateness can be challenging because we need to choose the correct language, get the non-verbal signals right, and choose appropriate behavior for the situation.
5. Establish a coaching environment
There is a real need to create an influential coaching culture. Indeed, it’s a long hard road. However, Jessica Jervis, training and development advisor to the CIPD, stated that the route to a coaching environment is similar to the coaching process. She says that training professionals have to start by understanding why they want to implement coaching.
But how to create a coaching climate? Well, these steps can lead you to achieve this target:
- Giving managers the basic skills of coaching.
- Equipping the employees with the necessary skills.
- Providing an advanced coaching skills program.
- Providing opportunities to review good coaching practice.
Wrap-up
Improving your customer service performance can take some time, but never give up! It is vital to implement different strategies. In this way, you will work effectively. Moreover, providing top-notch customer service retains customers and extracts more value from them.