There are a lot of companies out there that talk a lot about customer service but have some hurdles actually accomplishing it. All of your employees need to focus on providing a consistently great experience so that each customer walks away with the best impression. In this age of social media reviewing, this is even more important. The other aspect of it is repeat business that will keep putting money in your pocket year after year.
First, customer service is every part of the contact between your company and a customer (or potential customer). It’s over the phone, via email, and in-person. Here’s an EXPERT set of points that every boss should consider.
- Excellence: Providing the best products and services is a good first step, but part of that is respecting your employees enough to listen to them when they tell you that a product or service isn’t meeting your standards. They might have a faster, cheaper fix for it too.
- Politeness: Even when someone isn’t a customer yet, being polite to everyone should be your company’s aspiration. That might mean different things in different kinds of business, but establish minimum consistent standards for your staff so they know what is expected of them.
- Expect timeliness: Any customer expects timely service, but your employees should expect it too. Plan to have things done on a realistic schedule you lay out in advance. This helps ensure fewer misunderstandings between your staff and clients.
- Respond: If you’ve ever worked a customer service job you probably know that this is difficult, but every communication should have a response. The temptation is to take a note so that someone else can handle it, but if that person won’t be able to get to it immediately, letting a client or customer know that you received their communication will help put their mind at ease as they wait for your call back.
- Truth: You may need to work on the best possible way to deliver it in certain circumstances, but customers appreciate truthful answers. If your company gets found out in a lie, that’s the end of a good customer service experience. Everything else you do or say is going to be tainted.
As a manager you should always be working to make your customer service better, and you should do your best to get your employees involved with you. Ask them for their feedback, and ask them what they think is great service. There may be things that your company can do to make a great customer service impression that other companies can’t do, and your employees may be able to help you find them.
Part of being an expert customer service facility means following through on any improvements and changes that you make and not allowing things to slide back to how they were. And, since this is real life, you’ll have to keep evaluating your service over and over again, always looking for ways to make it better and to keep standards consistent over time.