Proactive communication is an important part of customer service. It helps to facilitate the customer journey and inspires customers to stay loyal to the company.
CEB Global study found that for every ten customers who have a high-effort service experience, nine will become disloyal and eight will say something negative about your brand to others.
At some moments customer service job can be a challenge. Dealing with different people and trying to meet their expectations is not an easy task. It takes patience, sharp intellect and I would even say wisdom to navigate through the various customer moods and still provide a professional service.
In this article I would like to review the biggest customer service challenges based on my own experience. I would like to share with you what I found worked best for me to overcome them and I hope my experience will be of use to you as well.
So let’s begin. >>>
If you are aiming for excellence, you can never stop learning and polishing your skills. What skills are needed for a great customer service?
There is a long-running debate over which set of skills is more important for a customer service rep, soft skills or technical skills.
A recent survey by Service Strategies concludes that 96% of respondents judged communication skills and interpersonal skills more important than technical skills for the success in customer support. After all, to resolve any technical problem a CSR needs strong communication skills to effectively gather information, analyze it and find a solution which will help the customer.
Aren’t they satisfied with their salary? Don’t they like their old laptops? Can’t they bear long traveling to and from office? Or maybe their chief isn’t empathetic enough?
It’s quite a difficult task to find the one who cares only about material values when deciding on a job. The ProvideSupport blog writers have prepared fascinating statistics on this issue. Take the trouble to have a look at it and find out how much chiefs lose per year just because of not being empathetic (reading will take you 3 minutes).
Each time when a young or already experienced specialist decides to apply for a job, they expect to be engaged at work, to love what they do, to have friendly and permanently smiling colleagues (such innocent fools!) and what else? An empathetic boss. Statistics show the great correlation between a chief’s empathy and employee’s productivity, that means between a chief’s empathy and company’s income.
Do you still doubt empathy plays an important role in business? Take a look at what we’ve prepared! >>>
What’s the most important thing a business needs to do to improve relationships with their customers and keep them coming back for more? The answer is pretty obvious, and yet so often overlooked: providing a delightful customer service.
No matter how good your product may be, or how competent your customer service team is, the only thing that matters is how your customers feel about your company.
And the key to providing an exceptional customer service lies directly in the ability of your team to deliver a positive experience. If you are a customer service manager, you are probably aware that it’s your team that is the face of your company, and your customers’ experiences will be driven by the skill and quality of the support they receive.
As a customer service manager, it’s your ability to drive both customer satisfaction, and employee engagement, that defines your own success. Happy agents are more likely to go above and beyond while servicing your customers. And customers who feel they are cared for, are the ones that will return.
The bottom-line is that you can’t have delighted customers with disengaged, or even disgruntled employees. That’s where you need to start. >>>
A decade ago, our familiarity of AI was only restricted to the silver screen. But today, the scenario has changed completely. Although AI is yet to take over our lives in a formidable way, as projected in 2004 blockbuster movie- I, Robot, the technology is certainly pervasive. It has transformed forever the way we interact with our immediate surroundings. The most notable forms of AI an average user is familiar with are – SIRI, Google Now and Alexa skills. Although these are examples of narrow or non-thinking AI, the application acts as personal assistant to make our lives organized and better.
But what if AI could think, analyze, recommend and predict? What difference would that make to our lives? Well, chances are that it may be already making a difference. For instance, recently if you have contacted your insurance company or your broadband provider, there is a good possibility that you may have interacted with a Chatbot, instead of a human agent. AI is taking over customer service department in a big way. >>>
Put simply, high trust is a dividend; low trust is a tax. In fact, in our increasingly low-trust world, trust has literally become the new currency of our global economy. — Stephen M.R.Covey
Digital innovation has transformed today’s business world: it has changed business environment and performance, as well as the whole landscape of customer choice. Today’s customers are more demanding, knowledgeable and selective, and the ways how they connect with brands nowadays largely define the key dimensions that shape up business relationships of the new digital era. >>>
Despite the rise of social media, live chat services and chatbots, email is still one of the most commonly used communication channels for businesses and individuals all over the world. In 2017 alone, over 269 billion emails were sent every single day.
When it comes to your business, the chances are that you communicate with your customers using this traditional method. In fact, as many as 46% of customers will choose email as their preferred method of communication.
So, as a business, what emphasis do you place on making sure that these emails are of the highest quality? Thanks to the level of connectivity that we all share, thanks to the internet, your customers now expect the very best service possible. They want to feel special. They want to feel valued. They want to feel like you care about them as individuals. >>>
Everyone working in customer service knows that words are incredibly powerful, and some of them can truly either make or break customer service experiences. In fact, according to Andrew Newberg M.D. and Mark Robert Waldman, the authors of Words Can Change Your Brain, a single negative word can trigger the release of dozens of stress-producing hormones. Using the right customer service phrases in your communication with customers makes all the difference between a bad service and a delightful one.
Empathy is the ability to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes”. Believe it or not, customers are not expecting customer service professionals to resolve their issues 100% of the time. On the other hand, they do expect empathy from service agents every single time they contact your company’s support. Empathy statements can do so much in making customers feel that they are understood, respected, and their feelings are validated. >>>
In any interaction, allowing another person to take the initiative and choose the terms of communication tends to empower them and enhance their experience. This is the main reason why customer self-service is so popular nowadays, as well as the main reason why it adds so much to the value of your brand. Aside from this, it is quite potent as a tool of reducing your company’s overhead, providing significant time-efficiency as well as allowing your customers to solve some of their issues on their own. Here are some examples.
The greatest advantage of customer self-service is probably the fact that the self-checkout devices provide a much lower overhead than actual cashiers or operators. Sure, acquiring these machines is not cheap, yet, over the course of time, they are bound to save you a small fortune. >>>