Providing great customer service could bring significant amount of growth to the business. Excellent customer service skills and brand awareness for service reps can result in doubled or tripled leads. When customers are provided with exceptional customer service there are 70% chances for the return of the customer.
Forrester’s CX index shows that how important it is to provide actual human assistance to the customers and how it can affect different businesses.
Aspect service index reveals that more friendliness in customer service would result in increased wallet share and could double your sales leads.
75% of customers would happily pay for exceptional customer service and 66% would be ready to pay more for excellent customer service. On average good customer service could also bring you 52% of paying customers.
What is customer service to you?
Desired results from a business can be achieved by realizing the importance of customer services and focusing on improving it. Excellent customer service skills include treating customers well. Answering their queries and going one step further in helping them could result in outstanding customer experience.
“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” -Sam Walton
Customer satisfaction is the key to building brand loyalty. Customer satisfaction results in good retention rate & increased sales conversion rate which are helpful in the growth of customer base. Satisfaction of the customer could be achieved by going beyond customer expectations and being authentic about the product is also a major part of managing customer expectations.
What does great customer service mean to you?
What is a good customer service ? But another relevant question is what does great customer service mean to you? How is it possible for a totally ordinary business to deliver excellent customer service?
Let’s discuss some of the principal strategies or skills that matter the most in customer service.
Active Listening
Active listening is a highly regarded soft skill and is as important as problem solving or critical thinking. When it comes to customer services active listening helps build better relationships with customers. Listening skills for customer service agents are very important for a loyal customer base.
“If you make listening and observation your occupation, you will gain much more than you can by talk.”— Robert Baden-Powell
Where it builds loyal customer base active listening shows a sign of respect to the customer. Let them speak first and complete their query, understand what they are telling and what they want. Ask open-ended questions and ask questions to seek clarification from customers. Paraphrasing or acknowledging is of great importance in customer service.
Empathy
Customer service is not only about solving or fixing customer’s problems it’s a lot more than that. The real purpose of customer service is to provide a better experience and that can only be achieved by putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. Empathy is the key to excellent customer service. If you’re unable to resolve a problem immediately, showing some empathy could result in your customers always leaving satisfied.
“There are no traffic jams along the extra mile.” – Roger Staubach
How to develop empathy in customer service?
· Listen carefully
· Be respectful and show that you care
· Understand the priorities of the customer
· Always acknowledge what they say
· Get feedback from customers
· Always use positive language
Effective & Clear Communication
Clear communication is an incredibly important soft skill for a live chat agent to have. Keeping the communication as simple as possible because neither mumbling nor jumbling is allowed also you can’t use slang while communicating.
Both in non-verbal and verbal communication techniques, clear communication helps build excellent customer service base. When it comes to delivering important points to the customers, keep it simple.
Time management
Time is the most difficult thing to manage in customer service. Sometimes it’s frustrating to answer a customer because not all customers would bother to know how difficult it could be for you to manage time as a customer service agent. While time management is frustrating, at the same time it’s a must-have skill for customer service agents.
In Time management skills quick responses should be the top priority while understanding the customers need properly. Learn to manage time effectively because in customer service lacking time management skill could cost your company a lot of business. To learn time management ask other customer service professionals how they manage their time.
Patience
Being patient means being ready to handle surprises. Every day is not Sunday and same goes for the customers, all the customers may not be calm and patient. In customer service, you have to deal with frustrated customers all day long. One thing you need to keep in mind is that the customer has got nothing personal against you.
Keep calm and try to understand what the customer might be going through. This is where “Put yourself in the customer’s shoes” comes in handy. No matter how harsh their tone is, always make use of positive language.
As for the customer service point of view, patience is important because that’s part of giving quality service to the customer or the client.
Hope this helps
Providing excellent customer service is important for every business. I hope the above-discussed strategies can help you in further improvement. Share your thoughts, do you have any other skills in your mind that you think would be helpful in improving customer service? Did I miss something? Feel free to share.