Customer Service Training Tips

Archive for the ‘Tips’ Category

Customer service is all about putting customers first. Their needs come first and your needs come second. If a customer expects a response from you in 24 hours, and you respond in 48 hours, you’re putting your needs first. Customers want consistency and dependability. If you say you will respond within 24 hours and you do it, they will turn to you with confidence the next time they need a response within 24 hours.

Customers like to feel special. Feeling special is a wonderful feeling you can give your customers by over-delivering in every area. Exceed their expectations! Imagine sending an e-mail with a question to a retailer and expecting a response the next day, only to receive one with half an hour. Would you feel special?

Another way to make customers feel special is to stay in touch with them. With your mailing list on computer, this is easy. You can send online holiday and even birthday greetings without the expense of supplies and postage. You can include helpful advice on various topics or offer something for free that they would appreciate. If you do, make sure the quality of the product is at least equal to the quality of your products, including the presentation or packaging. You always want to appear to be putting their needs ahead of yours.

Follow-up service after the sale should be just as good as or better than the service provided before the sale. Have you received excellent service before a sale then been put on hold for an hour when there was a problem with your purchase? Or got a customer service representative that obviously wanted to get you off the line as soon as possible? How did this make you feel about doing further business with the company? What if they had responded to your problem with the same excellent service they had given you in selling you the product? Would it make you want to be a loyal customer?

Honesty is a major component of a successful business. Few things are more infuriating than to invest in a product only to find out that you didn’t get what was promised. You should always project honesty about the quality, use, and benefits of your products. If enough customers get angry about false promises, they can put a company out of business. Honesty can be viewed as a major component in good customer service that builds trust and consequent repeat business.

Customer service personnel should be well trained. Having well-trained sales and marketing employees is only half the job. Sales people get customers, but customer service representatives keep customers. Consumers dislike a company that has well-trained sales people and poorly trained or untrained customer service representatives. Bad publicity travels fast and reverses marketing efforts. You should spend as much time training your customer service representatives as you do your sales team.

The quality of your customer service should be at least as good as that of your competition or you won’t keep customers long term. Reputable companies develop the trust of consumers and have the least trouble selling their products and services. The marketplace admires how they operate and treat their customers. One of the tenets of a reputable company is its commitment to providing excellent customer service. When a company has great customer service even the most difficult customer will leave feeling better.

Customer service should be of a consistent quality. You can walk into any McDonalds in the world and know what you will get. The food is prepared everywhere the same way. What if you walked into a McDonalds and got well-prepared french fries one day and badly prepared french fries the next day? The lack of consistency would discourage you from coming back. Consumers seek the same consistency from the companies they do business with that franchisees are known for providing.

What about customers who lie? Even when you think a customer is lying, it’s wise to give him the benefit of the doubt. Only a very few customers will actually take advantage of you. Procter and Gamble once received a complaint about a bad diaper, and the company sent her several cartons of diapers in response. The company sure got good word-of-mouth advertising by that action instead of bad publicity. Any amends made to customers can be considered a cost of doing business.

If you create, project, and maintain a positive image of your company, the competition will have to work hard to steal your regular and prospective customers. Developing brands work on projecting images. Sony and Lexus, for example, both project the image of quality products and superior customer care. If two products or services are of equal quality and one sells better than another, especially at a higher price, image is the reason.

These tips will help improve any company that applies them. By improving customer service, they will improve the retention rate.

Every day, all across the nation, call centers provide customers with their first and sometimes last contact with their clients’ businesses. If your call center is top notch and providing quality services, you’ll promote the image of your client and even enhance it. If your call center isn’t up to par, you will alienate or lose clients. Your quality assurance program should be fully integrated into every aspect of your call center to ensure the successful growth of your business. Call center intelligence is the term for achieving quality assurance.

Many call centers conduct monitoring, training, and reporting to some degree. They feel comfortable with their service as long as there are no major customer complaints. However, an absence of complaints does not mean a center provides superior service. Quality requires an ongoing initiative to make quality assurance a way of life at your call center. Then it will stand out from the crowd and attract more and better clients.

To accomplish this, first integrate quality into every aspect of hiring and training call center representatives. It can be tricky to select individuals with a knack for providing good customer service, but you can begin by designing screening tools based on the attributes of your current employees who excel at their job. Determine the skill sets they use and how they approach their work. You can also use this information as a basis for conducting interviews and screening applicants for their potential.

New representatives or agents should receive training in quality customer service from the first day. Intensive orientation and training allow the new hires to learn and practice good customer service skills from the start. Agents will not only understand what is expected of them, but also have the skills to accomplish it.

Some call centers require two weeks of intensive training for new hires, with role playing and practice with simulated calls before they are allowed to work on the floor. After an intensive orientation and practicing calls, new agents feel more confident in their ability to serve callers. They are also informed of the company’s resources and how to assist customers with questions. Some companies also require attendance at a refresher course every six months. Call centers that provide excellent training tend to win awards for the quality of their customer service.

Ideally, supervisors and managers can be recruited from among the call center associates. If not, those selected should undergo the same training as a new call center hire. Managers must be able to understand the call center agent’s position from within, and they should also learn the quality assurance representative’s position. Managers should be able to provide interim training and counseling for the call center associates and assess quality assurance issues.

At many call centers, production reports are reviewed daily or even weekly. Although these reports are useful, they don’t address problems as they are happening. Some call centers use real-time reporting programs that identify problems quickly and avoid customer dissatisfaction. Statistics can be viewed continuously and those falling outside the norm can be quickly addressed. Taking too little time on calls can be as bad a sign as taking too much time. Good customer service doesn’t mean rushing customers and getting them off the phone as quickly as possible. Real-time reporting helps managers quickly identify good performers and assess their methods. By determining what makes them good, managers can strive to train other agents to duplicate their efforts.

Call monitoring will continue to be an important tool in any quality assurance program. You can add a program to your system that allows shadow monitoring, enabling you to see what the agent is typing while he or she is talking, thereby identifying problems with software and database usage.

Ensuring the highest quality service at your call center shouldn’t be left entirely up to the quality assurance team. If you integrate quality assurance into all your processes, you’ll be able to watch client satisfaction skyrocket.

If you want to keep customers coming back, good customer service is essential. It’s the best way to encourage repeat business for the long term. Super stores with hundreds of employees don’t usually give their customer service representatives or floor workers sufficient incentive to be customer friendly. They often don’t provide training in customer service skills or don’t insist that employees use what they learn in training. They may be given minimal training then be forgotten after employment and left to fend for themselves.

Training employees in the art of providing good customer service can be an inexpensive improvement that results in increased sales and business. Offering regular refresher courses can be easily accomplished and add to your company’s profitability. Your employees should have good people skills and enjoy working with people. One employee with a bad attitude can have an impact, especially on a small business.

Sometimes customers can be difficult. They may be complaining, demanding, picky, unreasonable, know-it-all, and faultfinding. There’s no way to avoid these customers. Overwhelmed by emotion, angry people cannot reason because anything you might say to help them gets filtered through their anger. Trying to solve their problems or negotiate with them doesn’t do any good. However, you can listen to them and let them vent their emotions. After they have their say, the first thing you should do is apologize. Recent research shows that fewer than half of angry customers receive an apology and that the fastest way to diffuse a situation is with two little words: “I’m sorry.” Most people simply want their feelings to be acknowledged. They don’t want to be ignored or made to feel that their situation is unimportant.

The customer is not always right, and some people try to feel better by making someone else feel bad. Being a captive audience, a store clerk or customer service representative is easy prey for displaced aggression. Employees should understand that being courteous to customers does not mean accepting abuse from them. But saying something like “I’m sorry. Thank you for letting me know that you’re unhappy with…” will usually calm even the angriest of customers.

New employees should go through corporate training upon hire. To save the cost of having multiple training sessions, however, you can wait until you have a full class of new hires. At informational training sessions, new employees can be given all the essential information on corporate policies and benefits as well as contact information for any questions they might have in the future.

Managers may decide to provide additional corporate training, depending on situations that arise between individuals or on issues pertaining to specific projects. If tension is running high, a retreat in a casual setting might be in order to help employees unwind and get back to basics. Many companies offer training services in-house or at nearby locations where your employees can participate in enjoyable and useful team-building exercises.

Sometimes it’s appropriate to send employees off site for development. Seminars can be a fun and exciting way to learn team building and communication with certified experts from around the country. Your team might embrace the idea of an interactive ropes course or it might benefit more from a thoughtful and enjoyable afternoon taking the Meyers-Briggs test and discussing the results. There are many ways to get people involved and communicating that can have long-term, positive effects on the work environment.

Performance assessment is another aspect of employee development that requires thought. The 360-degree evaluation has quickly become the most popular method of assessment. It includes a self-assessment as well as an assessment by the supervisor and the employee’s coworkers. The review process emphasizes self-knowledge and growth. You can save your human resources department a lot of time by using any of a number of software products that facilitate the administration of employee evaluations.

Customer retention is crucial to a business, and engaging in activities to retain customers is a priority. It costs less and is more profitable to retain a customer than it is to get a new customer. The lifetime value of a customer is far more than the value of a single purchase by a one-time customer. Yet managers are often puzzled by how to encourage customer retention.

A loyal following not only translates to greater profits, but also to a good reputation and the best advertising of all: word of mouth. Satisfied customers spread the word and bring in new customers who are likely to frequent your business. Retaining customers saves you money. On average, it takes seven attempts or more before a prospect will buy.

It does not have to be difficult to retain customers, however; all it takes is good customer service. If you meet your customers’ needs for prompt, courteous service and continue to survey prospects, you’ll always be one step ahead. By anticipating and meeting customers’ wants and needs, and even exceeding their expectations, you can be assured of customer retention. Customers will be impressed with the value they receive and continue to do business with you.

Another way to ensure customer satisfaction is through loyalty programs in which you reward your clients for continuing to do business with you. Recognize them and they’ll take notice of you. Take them for granted and they’ll go elsewhere. If you show that you appreciate the people who keep you in business, you’ll stay in business. Without them, you would not have a business.

Eighty percent of customer service calls are complaints. Listening to complaints day after day can be discouraging. You must hire the right kind of person to handle these calls; it must be someone who can maintain a professional attitude and stay upbeat. Ongoing or regular customer service training can help your employees stay motivated and alleviate stress.

Your customer service representatives probably know your products and services better than any other employees in the company. Customer service can be more than just a tool for retaining customers. You can also train your service staff in cross-selling. With the knowledge they already have, they could benefit from training in sales basics, and you could benefit by turning your customer service department into another source of revenue.

Is your customer service training effective? Your customers will only be as satisfied in doing business with you as your customer service makes them. Your customer service representatives will only provide good service if they are well trained. Today many companies are turning to outside research firms to determine the quality and effectiveness of their customer service training.

These firms begin by implementing surveys of both your employees and customers. Next, they conduct a detailed analysis of the data to pinpoint those areas needing improvement and provide recommendations. Addressing your weaknesses and using their professional recommendations and customer service tips will enable you to fine-tune your training program.

Revamping your training program gives you the opportunity to overhaul your entire customer service department. Hard data obtained by the research firm from surveying customers will result in suggestions for better organization of the department. A customer service design based on the feedback of real customers will be far superior and more successful than a design conceived in a corporate office based on theory and assumptions.

After assessing the data from a customer service survey, you’ll be able to reconsider your company’s method of providing customer service. Once you have a plan, you can retrain your employees to implement it. Training based on data coming directly from the customer will help your staff better respond to the customers’ needs. This will quickly give you an edge over your competitors.