How to Improve Customer Service and Ensure Customer Satisfaction
Branimir Hrženjak
Content Writer
⏱ Reading Time: 8 minutes
Customers seek support at any time during the day. Moreover, since they’re using multiple devices and are connected to the internet all the time, they are more demanding than ever and have extremely high expectations from customer service.
For companies, this means that high investment in customer care is necessary if they want to have satisfied customers and open opportunities for new prospects.
Speaking plainly, if you want to have customers who are satisfied with customer service, you should react instantly at anytime and anywhere. Improve customer service by following our guide!
🚀Read Customer Service: A Guide for Successful Business Growth 🚀
In this text, we’ll go through strategies on how to improve your customer service. We will focus in more detail on customer service over the phone and what you can do to make it exceptional.
11 Rules on How to Improve Customer Service
#1: Think About Consumers as Individuals
People come from different backgrounds, experiences, issues, and mindsets. It is essential to realize that your client should be at the center of your business strategy, not your product or service. You should consider the experience your customers have when visiting your website, what they think and feel. Find out which steps you need to take to improve and build on it!
#2: Listen? No, Listen!
Listening is one of the most straightforward secrets of customer service success. Customers want to know that you understand their situation and their particular circumstances.
#3: Educate!
Make sure that your customers understand your processes and procedures.
This will make the process easier, not only for your customers but your customer service employees.
#4: Don’t Forget to Be Polite
Gratitude and kindness are appreciated and memorable, as they can remind your customers why they pick your service and company. No matter what type of business you have, saying thank you after every transaction is one of the easiest ways to start a habit of excellent customer service.
Picture 1. Kindness is a feature of excellent customer service
#5: Respond Promptly and Accurately
Let customers know when they can expect results. Be mindful of the accuracy of the information you’re giving out. Also, always try and do the job right the first time, as your customers won’t appreciate false or misleading information. This will improve customer service in your company or business.
#6: Be Civil and Respectful
Displaying professionalism shows the customer that you value their work. Customer service can often involve emotions. So, it’s essential to make sure you and others you have handling your customer service tasks are always courteous and respectful. Never let your own emotions overtake your desire to see your customer walk away happy.
#7: Be Friendly
Don’t sound like a machine when helping users. Customers get easily frustrated when they can’t talk to the right person, someone who will understand their situation. Avoid sounding like a machine when engaging with customers, try to make them feel as they’re having a conversation with a friend.
If you want to improve customer service, be kind, try to understand them, and put yourself in their position to provide the best solution. Show specific empathy! If you’re speaking over a telephone, make sure you come off as engaging and willing to go the extra mile.
#8: Always Use Positive Language
It’s good to focus on using positive language and approach while dealing with customers. Having this in mind, it’s essential they feel comfortable talking to an agent. Keep them interested and give them a reason to come back – it’s that simple!
People tend to be stressed out in general. You should be the one who delivers a stress-free experience and you can achieve that by giving them a solution to their inquiry!
#9: Be the Expert
Show the customer that you are the right person with the right expertise to provide the services and information that they need. Do your best to tackle the problem, confirm the dilemma, and refocus the conversation to solve the problem. It’s essential that the client leaves happy and satisfied.
Related: Check out the essential characteristics of a great support agent.
#10: Ask for Feedback
If you want to know what your customers think of your company or business – ask them! Use website feedback form to engage and entertain. You can ask engaging questions to inspire people to share more about themselves and their work habits.
#11: Master Closing a Conversation
The ability to close a conversation makes every single interaction better. More importantly, it must be motivating and inspiring for further co-operation. Leaving an issue unresolved creates unnecessary problems. Due to this fact, customer services vocabulary must showcase the essential things.
For example, the fact you care about customer’s problems getting fixed. And the fact that you are ready to continue until you get it right. Improve customer service by always asking is there anything else you can help them while they’re on the line. Learning about these things can help you to understand your customers better. Plus make them feel good about themselves and your company.
Picture 2. Don’t forget to ask for feedback!
Successful Customer Service Over the Phone
Using the mobile phone and the Internet is not new and strange for us. We use them in almost every activity, like contacting family and friends or business partners via phone or e-mail. You can do everything- book flights or hotels, take pictures and share them online, read the news, and a lot of other activities. Will mobile customer care be any different? Probably not.
The use of mobile phones and applications is intuitive to everyone today. No matter in how many ways customer care on the go is different from what has been learned so far, agents will need a basic short tutorial online, and they are ready to go and help customers in real-time, no matter where they are.
Microsoft Corporation once said:
“97% of consumers say customer service is important in their choice of and/or loyalty to, a brand.”
Remember, nothing speaks volumes like a happy customer.
Improve Your Customer Service Over the Phone With 6 Simple Steps
To improve the statistics on the customer service side and to inspire exceptional customer care means being able to wrestle with active mobile, social, and millennial behavior shifts that happened in recent years. That’s why customer care should not be just a desk job! Instead, it should thrive towards creating a dynamic environment and focus on inspiring your customers to interact with your brand.
If you want to learn how to improve customer service over the phone, follow these steps:
Picture 3. Phone customer service can be improved in a couple of steps
1. Build Customer Care Service
Research shows that 37.5% of organizations have not invested in the right technology to support customers on social channels. You should invest in this service if you want to build trust between customers and in the end – manage your customer relationships effectively. Besides investing in technology, a company should always also invest in employees, their education, and motivation. Provide a positive working environment for your employees.
Read 9 Ways to Improve Customer Responsiveness
2. Practise Active Listening
It’s extremely important that your customers feel that their concerns are heard. So make sure your agents listen attentively to every customer, ask questions about their concerns, and allow your customers to talk without interruptions.
Summarizing the main points of the issue before engaging into the problem-solving process will calm your customers and show them that they’re in the right hands.
3. Increase Your Team
Thanks to localized customer care, you’re able to employ people who are responsible for customers no matter where they are. It doesn’t matter if your business is global, you should be able to provide customer care in every part of the day – even in their native tongue. Localized customer care makes it is easy to create and train dedicated teams for a specific location. Keeping this in mind, you will be able to hire experts in their field to work in America and Asia. Trust your customer service agents.
4. Give Customers What they Need – Attention
Recognize their needs, respond to them and give them even more than they ask. Give them qualitative service and they will return the favor with just what a company needs, and that’s good word-of-mouth. Remind your customers and some vital information that they give you through some notes or tags. Customer care over the phones provides you a possibility to mark that information whenever and wherever you want. It is essential to hear the voice of the customer for growing your brand loyalty and business opportunities.
5. Happy Agent = Happy Customer
If the agent is satisfied with the conditions of work, if you have trust in him, his happiness will reflect on the customer too. Listen to what your agents are telling you, be flexible, and have a positive working atmosphere. React to advice and change what is not working. Most importantly, don’t ignore your agents. They are the ones caring about your business and making your customer happy.
Picture 4. Happy customers
6. Call Recording
There are numerous benefits of call recording for both your company and your customers. These recordings can provide valuable insights into how your employees communicate with your customers. You can see which employees do a good job and which need a bit more training. It makes it easier for you to point to mistakes when you’re talking to an employee who doesn’t do their job the way you wanted them to do it. And also – it is a great onboarding and training material for your new employees since they can hear real-life examples of what they are expected to do.
In addition, having recordings of your customer service conversations gives you a chance to make a thorough analysis of the most frequent problems your customers have. This can give you valuable input about which segments of your product or service need the most improvement and about some future updates and changes you should make to what you already have.
Have Any Tips to Share?
Have any phone support tips to share with the Paldesk community? Add your comments and let’s discuss.
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