Customer service is one of those components that, from the perspective of the call handler or customer service representative, is an incredibly unrewarding task, yet customer relationships are so vital to growing your business. Customer service can be complicated to get right, therefore, you need to streamline customer service practices to make life easier for you, your customer service representatives, and the business. What can we do?
Adopt Many Methods of Communication
Customers want to get in contact with you through their preferred choice. This doesn’t just mean the telephone (although it is still the predominant form of communication), but web forms, emails, and instant messages are just as important.
However, we’ve got to remember that with every communication method comes a different way of communicating. Live chat is a very good example that can solve a solution quickly. Having the best online live chat support for website users means customers can get to the root of a problem quickly, which is a very important part of remote support. It allows customers to articulate their thoughts better, but also allows customer agents more time to take in the information.
Compare this to customers calling via telephone when they are angry and emotional, putting the call handler under a lot of stress. When you start to adopt a variety of communication methods, everybody can benefit.
Skills Training
We have to display some sense of empathy to our customer service agents. Customer service is one of those facets of a business that really needs rewarding more. Many people get a customer service job because they cannot get anything else. But we have to remember that anybody going into customer service needs to have a variety of tools to deal with conflicts on a never-ending basis.
Customer service agents need to know how to de-escalate a situation, and if we are only giving our customer service agents the skills to click through a system and provide answers to questions that your customer could have found in a FAQ section, you are wasting time and money, and your customers are not looking at your business as something that is truly worth their time and effort.
If you want to make sure that your customers have been dealt with, you must deal with the customer service agents. Giving your employees a variety of skills to deal with conflict and also calm themselves down in a stressful environment is going to improve their well-being.
Anticipating Needs
The more you know your customers, the better you will become at anticipating what they want. We have to remember that if customers are getting in contact with us, it’s a general rule that approximately 80% of their queries are recurring ones. Therefore, this is something that can easily close the loop between the customer, the customer service agent, and the business.
A detailed FAQ section is so important in this respect.
A customer can look through a FAQ section and find common concerns with a proper answer. When you are aware of regular problems that occur, but also give your customers the autonomy to deal with them themselves, this highlights that you know the customer and what their problems are, but you are also giving them the tools to overcome the issue now and in the future.
There will be times when customers need to get in contact because they really don’t have the time to go through these things themselves. Customer service agents should be well versed in the FAQ section, so they can go through these painful problems and solve them effectively. A customer may call because they literally do not have the time to go through these issues themselves, therefore, a customer service agent that can just follow a set list of instructions can be an easy way to get customers on- side.
Provides the Best Equipment
Many customers’ frustrations escalate when there is a problem with the system. We have to expect that there will be power outages or system problems due to downtime on a regular basis, however, the customer service agent needs to know how to manage a customer’s expectations, but if you are still operating with outdated software, this can make the customer agents look foolish.
If you looked at it from a battle perspective, would you give your army the smallest of weapons and unsophisticated defense tactics? No. You would be better off frontloading with the most sophisticated and strong methods available. The same thing applies here. Upgraded software that is user-friendly is going to make the process simpler for everybody involved. You want to make the customer service process efficient, and this means not just having the latest software in place, but ensuring that there are practices put in place to make things easier for your call handlers. Workflows are so important, but you also need to start incorporating automation tools.
One of the common concerns amongst call handlers is that they are given outdated equipment which means taking a long time to solve a problem. So if they’re trying to get a satisfactory outcome for the customer, this leaves the customer hanging on the line and the call handler has to jump through an endless amount of hoops. When you really start to think about how a process can be simplified, you’re going to increase the rates at which problems are solved, therefore, increasing the volume of happy customers.
Improving Customer Agent Well-Being
Well-being is something that is incredibly important in any working environment post-pandemic. You may have employees that are still working remotely which means that they might feel themselves out at sea on their own. It’s vital for team leaders to have a system where they can check in with their employees and ensure that everything is okay.
Employees will have issues outside of work that could affect their ability to do the job properly. Any customer service agent may find their buttons being pushed by one type of customer that tries to make it personal. We have to remember that those customers are not essential to our business as a whole. In life, there will always be troublemakers. But if we can ensure that our customer service agents have the ability to avoid stress when necessary or, at the very least, learn to calm down, this is going to make them far better and more efficient customer service agents.
Well-being is so important. But well-being can take many different forms. It’s up to you as the business to provide a wide variety of components that will ensure that they feel supported, secure, and have the confidence to do their job properly.
Increase Their Knowledge
You can create a variety of centralized tools for customers to use, but it’s also crucial for your employees to have a wider variety of knowledge so they can not only solve problems but become more accountable in the process. A common problem customer service agents have is not being able to solve a problem effectively, either because they don’t either have the tools available or they have just been thrown in at the deep end.
It’s a hard task to get right, solving a customer’s problem on the phone when they are breathing down your neck and learning how to solve something right there at the moment. It’s multitasking that can be mitigated with the right level of knowledge. After all, we can’t expect a customer service agent to own a problem or be accountable without having 100 percent knowledge on the subject.
From the perspective of my business owner, this is not just unfair, but it can be incredibly cruel. Customer service agents need a bible, but they also need to have those actionable tools to de-escalate an issue.
Bring Your Support Closer to the Customers in Need
We’ve already discussed FAQs or different methods of communication, but we can also provide a number of self-service platforms that can increase autonomy amongst our customers. When we’re trying to improve customer engagement, we get closer to them and understand the ways that they wish to solve the problem.
Customer service agents can find themselves on the receiving end of verbal abuse because a customer has attempted to navigate FAQs or “How To” guides with little success. If you can give your customers more opportunities to take care of their needs, this means they will not be getting in contact with you as much. It’s those rare problems that should be solved by customer service representatives that are skilled in those rare and difficult to handle areas.
A company is only as good as its customer service practices. As much as you need to keep investing in your business, you must also remember that when customer service representatives are dealing with people on a regular basis, they need a wide variety of tools to ensure they are delivering the best service. Customer service is an undervalued part of a business, but rather than focusing on the importance of the people further up the chain, if we took the approach where we looked after the people at the bottom of this ladder, they would feel more appreciated, be more skilled, and solve the multitude of problems that benefit everyone.