How to Ensure Excellent Customer Service

Are your goals to have greater customer satisfaction, more referrals and better customer retention? One way to reach them is through excellent customer service. Do you provide this? Do your employees? It sounds simple enough, as we are all consumers, but do you know how to ensure excellent customer service?

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

1. Soft Skills
   These skills are not soft; they're foundational. And just like the foundation of a house, they must be built to withstand an enormous amount of stress and pressure. Soft skills provide the ability to ...
   · Solve customer problems
   · Spot and exploit sales opportunities
   · Build loyalty
   Soft skills are as hard as any business skills can be. Teach your CSRs everything they need to know about communication effectiveness, call control, rapport, phone etiquette and conflict resolution.
2. Customer Reality
   Bad customer service is often a result of not realizing the customers’ reality. Do you have an automated recording telling customers their call is important to you, and do you answer all calls within the first few minutes of initiation? Do you have CSRs who listen to the problem and what solution the customer would like, before they try to “resolve the situation?" Do you have a checklist of what you dislike about customer service, and do you teach your employees to repeat none of them? If not, you may be undermining your success on the back-end. Teach your personal expectations of excellent customer service.
3. Make Customer Service Training Ordinary
   Cultivate a business culture where excellent customer service training is constant and ordinary. Teach it as you do any other core business function. It leads to better-trained CSRs and creates buy-in!
   By demonstrating that customer service training is important and essential enough to be “ordinary,” CSRs feel recognized. Instead of feeling like part of the problem they become part of an essential and valued business process.
4. Make it Real
   Find out what your CSRs are feeling. Understand their frustrations, and give them a forum to provide their honest feedback in a blame-free, punishment-free environment. Finding out from your CSRs what needs to improve is much cheaper than finding out from ex-customers.
5. Enlarge Your Idea of Service
   Service must embrace all contact channels. Everyone who interacts with a customer--current and prospective--must be trained in excellent customer service. This includes the accounts receivable staff, the on-site technician and the day shift custodian. Remember, from a customer's perspective, these role distinctions are meaningless. If any of these employees are untrained, customers may make harsh and often immediate evaluations.
6. Follow the Golden Rule
   CSRs see the hypocrisy between how they're treated, and how they're expected to treat customers. If they think they are being treated poorly, disrespectfully, or worse, they may have trouble changing standards when dealing with customers. Businesses lose a tremendous amount of internal credibility when they tolerate double standards of service--one for their employees, and one for their customers. Aim to provide excellent employee service.
7. Don’t Get Comfortable with Success
   Business is cyclical. Do something well and soon your competitors do it just as well, maybe even better. This is when excellent customer service will continue to give you an edge, even when products and services match yours.

Tips & Warnings

• Excellent customer service isn't some feel-good, sing-a-long presentation session. It's a serious, strategic investment that warrants constant focus, follow-through and review.

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