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Archive for the ‘Customer Service’ Category

Customer Service is basically like you before your clients, will run during and after a sales interaction or a service is provided.

In this age of computers and the Internet a lot of changes are done to make life easier. But these innovations have become impersonal and Client Services for most scripted.

In business the customer is king is still valid, no matter how far-fetched, unrealistic, or some of their exposures are. Everyone knows that a company needs to maintain a loyal customer base and manage – customers who are ready, repeat transactions to do with the companies prosper. Every satisfied customer’s business is expanding exponentially. For behind every single client happy is 10 more potential customers.

Any strong marketing support to a company for its products and services are still falling behind its goal when customer service is not available or lousy at best.

Also, is defined as customer service?

A customer service is as good, if the service comes with a smile. It is to go on the perceived value of the product or service. It is too far from the mechanical customer service scripts that we have all become accustomed.

the need for human interaction in every encounter with a customer and their issues and problems in a satisfactory manner is done.
In this modern world of technology, where everything just as limitless and is considered seamless
, assignment of a generic customer service department handles questions is an outdated practice.

Company managers are already aware that the clients with employees in the various levels of the organization. Each one represents the company. Should an incident occur, the interaction between a company employee and a client, there is high probability that unwanted adverse information will be passed by the injured customers of the company. prevent the solution to this problem of negative publicity, is a well-trained team on good customer service and rules for use with customers.

The Internet was also a new approach to customer satisfaction. A web-marketing company relies on a kind of self-service style or approach to the management of individual customer requirements. A visitor to their website, when purchasing products or services online, is rather Transact again with the company, if he sees that all he can with a click of the mouse had to be. The user friendliness of the website the easy access to his support staff, lodge a complaint or return of a product is great for customer satisfaction.

Marketing support is an integral part contribute to the initial money to the company. The only thing is to keep the profits at the end is rendering good customer service.

What do these companies have in common, Southwest Airlines, Neiman Marcus, Marriot, Disney, and Enterprise Car Rental? They are all customer service pioneers. Each company has forged a new path through their commitment, dedication, and innovations, to become known as leaders in delivering excellent customer service. Serving the customer is more than some fancy words on their company mission statements. Customer service truly represents the very essence of each company’s’ existence.

These companies, along with hundreds more, have already done the hard work; they have laid the ground work, set the examples, and blazed the trails for other companies to follow. They have demonstrated how to achieve success by serving the customer.

Why then, don’t all companies follow this proven path to success?
Do they not know the core principles these companies follow?

To borrow a concept from the Late Show with David Letterman, this is a top ten list of principles all companies need to implement to achieve service excellence.

Number 10: Focus – The customer should always be the number one focus of any company. All decisions, services, and products should be based upon satisfying the needs and expectations of the customers.

Number 9: Take Action – The best laid plans will never come to life, without action. If you are going to talk-the-talk, then you must walk-the-walk. When companies, which brag about the importance of customer service, fail to deliver outstanding service, customers and employees lose faith and trust in them.

Number 8: Create Happy Employees – Your employees’ beliefs, attitudes and behaviors determine the quality of the customer service provided. The quality of customer service will never exceed the quality of the people who provide it. Happy employees create happy customers.

Number 7: Develop Employees – The three key words in employee development are training, training, and training. Teach your employees how to serve the customer, equip them to serve, and then empower them to serve with excellence.

Number 6: Establish Relationships – Customer loyalty is achieved by having a relationship with your customers. The stronger the relationship, the more loyal your customer becomes. Relationships are built upon trust, communication, and interaction. Every customer interaction is an opportunity to further enhance communication and improve trust.

Number 5: Measure Performance – If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Measuring customer satisfaction, customer feedback, and employee adherence to customer service standards is paramount in delivering exceptional customer service with any degree of consistency. Always inspect what you expect.

Number 4: Build Team Unity – To achieve optimal success everyone must be on the same page, striving for the same goal, aspiring to the same vision, and functioning as a team. Teamwork will always produce greater results, then individuals working alone.

Number 3: Formulate a Plan – Is the care your customers receive by design or by default? Without a crystal clear, well defined, universal set of customer service standards you will leave customer satisfaction up to chance. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Number 2: Commit to Excellence – Customer service is the number one differentiator in today’s competitive marketplace. Having a good product or a low price does not guarantee a competitive advantage or customer loyalty anymore. Commit to installing and fostering a customer-first culture within your company. Serving with excellence is a choice.

And the Number 1 principle all companies need to implement to achieve service excellence is:

Belief – Believe in the power of customer service. Believe in necessity of customer retention. Believe in the relationship between customer loyalty and the growth of your business. Believe that becoming customer-focused not only makes good business sense but it guarantees increased revenue and profit. It has been said,” A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses, it is an idea that possesses the mind.”

I challenge every company to not only implement these principles, but to have the faith, courage, and vision to move beyond providing excellent customer service to building a reputation as a customer service pioneer.

Some companies make things happen
Some companies watch what happens
Some companies wonder what happened

Quite a few organizations hire employees in internal positions such as human resources, marketing, sales, facilities, cafeteria, accounting or security without adequate training in customer service skills. Generally, unless a customer complains or compliments an employee their supervisor typically assumes that everything is being done well and provides positive feedback on their performance review.

Customer Services includes small and large details such as understanding the needs and purchasing habits of the customers, responding to all e-mail and phone inquiries, human contact and conversation, taking responsibility, to celebrate little triumphs with them, commiserate in their complaints and even get to know them. These customers once made will remain loyal customers forever.

By itself customer service is too vast to handle unless you are a large business with well defined sections in your office. Outsourcing customer service can allow a small or medium business to take care of its core competencies, while the customers are professionally and satisfactorily dealt with.

Online customer service is handled by quite a lot of call centers. The need for such service arises on two accounts.

First an online business is a 24*7 business. Your customers belong to the world and there are several time zones out there! Their hours and holidays are different from yours. Remember you lose a customer to your competitor if you do not respond to their calls.

Secondly, call response needs training and expertise handling. You cannot personally attend each call. So you need to hire employees. Each employee will need to be trained in your products, their handling and customer responses. So you will need to setup an entire process. The entire procedure is very time centric. If time is at premium (as it is for most of us) outsource it to the experts. Call center employees are trained in such procedures, responses come easier to them and they are trained to present a human face to the prospect.

Outsourcing customer service may have its pitfalls if the call center and business do not work closely in tandem with each other. The outsourcing company should work with the call center hand in hand to get customer feedback. The script flow must be based on previous experience of the company. The concept of personal attention to the customer is very important for closing a call. There some guidelines to be followed for ideal customer service assistance. Some of them are discussed here.

The customer must be put first as a person. The customer should be helped to make a decision and not pushed to buy. Respect him and he will respect you in turn and come back to you.

Listen to what the customer has to say. Clarify their doubts and answer the questions. The customer service employee should always have in-depth knowledge about the product or services. If unable to respond to a query immediately take the customers contact id and respond soon. Customers always have a tendency to look for a problem solver rather than an order taker

Learn about the customer in a casual way not as a marketing survey sort of thing. The easiest way to do this is to ask for them for feedback about their experience with the company or organization.

Respect the customers time. If a customer is in hurry be fast and friendly whatever the medium. In companies where the customer profile has senior citizens may want to talk a while. Give into them. They’ll come back to you for sure. It is also important to be fast and friendly.

If promises are made, should always be kept with the customers. If not, they should be compensated.

Lastly, review and feedback go a way in improving customer service. The staff can be asked about unusual requests or difficult situations. Reviews teach many important lessons.

In addition to the above points some do nots have to be kept in mind. Pitfalls such as incompetence, disorganization, unprofessional manners, lack of standard policy, delays and unreliability lose customers. It’s said that happy customers are the best and most effective way to find new customers. Let your prospects and leads rave about your customer services.

What is customer service? Have you ever stopped to really think about this question? We have trained literally thousands of people and hundreds of organisations in customer service. No matter who the person or what the organisation, the answer to this question is always generic. They will say: “Customer service is about giving customers what they want” or perhaps “it’s about satisfying customers” some times they will say that it is about “making customers happy.”

While at first glance these answers may sound correct, nothing could be further from the truth. Say for example that you ran a restaurant. If a customer were to enter your restaurant and ask for some office supplies would you be able to give the customer what they want? Would you be able to satisfy a customer who was looking for some jewellery if you worked in a hardware store? No, it would be impossible. The best that you could do would be to politely tell the customer where they can go and get Jewry. Obviously, customer service is not about giving customers what they want, or even satisfying customers.

The same is true for the way we give customer service. When we ask the question: what is the most important thing for good customer service, almost everyone we ask will answer: smile. While this may be good in some cases it is not appropriate in all cases. Just imagine if a distressed mother came up to you and told you that she had lost her 2 year old child in your store. Imagine how she would respond if you were to smile at her? Or imagine if a customer told you that he/she slipped while climbing the stairs or escalator in your store and as they explained their excruciating injuries you smiled back at them.

The truth is that customer service is not about practicalities, it’s about principles. The practicalities may change but the principles stay the same. Staff are not meant to smile all the time, to give customers everything they want, or to satisfy all their needs. Staff are meant to promote the organisation and its values. If you want to increase the impact of your customer service teach staff to represent your organisation and its unique traits.

When we teach customer service training modules we first focus on what the organisation values, what it’s all about and what does it want customers to see. Once we have done this, we move on to how to serve in light of these values. This is a very easy way of getting staff to change the way they serve, it produces better results and is a lot more fun to teach.

Here is something you can do to help your staff engage in effective customer service. Take a black/white board and draw a very basic house. Ask staff to take a piece of chalk or the white board marker and to take turns to turn this basic house into your organisation/company. They may add pictures or words to the basic drawing. Some will add words like: quality, professionalism, friendliness, service, money, speed, or simplicity while others may draw things like customers and staff.

Now ask staff this simple question: in light of this picture, what does a good customer service representative do? The participants will now find it easy to see what customer service is really about in your organisation. They may say for example, in light of us being a friendly company we should smile. Or perhaps they will highlight the organisation’s professionalism and explain that it’s professional to stand up straight and to dress appropriately.

Instead of teaching staff practicalities teach them principles and the practicalities will follow naturally.

Nothing’s worse than when a situation is more confusing and complicated than it needs to be, especially when it comes to your customer service experience.

Here’s an example: Say you have just purchased a pair of shoes for a sale price. However, when the item is scanned at the counter, the sale price does not come up. The regular price does.

Now, an easy answer to this solution would be for the customer service representative to already know why this is occurring and plug the sales price in without any hassles.

However, in most cases, what happens is another customer service rep is called over the intercom while you wait in line. Ten minutes later, the two customer service reps will question you and often you will be left to return back to the item and find the price tag with the sales price.

By then you are fed up and don’t even want the shoes anymore.

This is not an easy solution and is the perfect example of poor customer service.
Make sure this doesn’t happen to your customers by always providing them with the easiest methods possible.

•    When it comes to your contact informative, ensure that your customers know how and where to contact you. Include your email address, your phone number and your business hours on all websites, emails, directories, business cards, flyers and in the store front.

Make sure your customers know that you are there to help them, no matter what.

•    Opt for a Toll Free Number for your help desk. Toll free numbers do not collect unwanted costs for your customers. Sometimes customers choose not to call simply because there is no toll free number available.

Give you customer the option of calling Toll Free to make their customer service experience as helpful as possible.

•    Offer a Simple Refund Policy. Sometimes a refund is necessary and there is nothing worse than having to jump through hoops in order to return a product.

Ensure this doesn’t happen by providing an efficient refund policy where your customers do not have to prove their purchase with several pieces of documentation.

Instead, keep records of purchases, especially large ones, in a computer system. This will simplify the process for the customers and keep them coming back for more.

•    Answer the phone yourself rather than using a large phone service system. Although they may be convenient to you, often times your customers will disagree.

A confusing phone service will leave your customer frustrated and annoyed at the lack of personal care.

Instead try to answer the phone or hire a cheerful receptionist who can effectively transfer the calls without your customers being subjected to the dreaded automated service.

The most important thing to remember is that with a simple and efficient customer service policy comes a loyal customer base.

Want to learn more? Check out Customer Service Profits for your all-access pass to how to ensure your customers are 100 percent satisfied and guaranteed to return for more.