If your company suffers the misfortune of obtaining a reputation for poor customer service, then your business is in trouble.
It really is that simple. Now – more than at any point in history – there is an absolute insistence that companies get it right. Customers have more ways to contact companies than ever before through the head office address right through to social media accounts – and they expect their orders and complaints to be dealt with swiftly.
The problem becomes even harder due to the fact that it’s trickier than ever to work in customer service. Those same customers and their high expectations can make the job grueling, which wears down a workforce and promotes high turnover. Your business is liable to spend more money on training new employees than actually paying customer service agents a salary if you don’t focus hard on this area.
So, get customer service wrong and you could lose employees, money, and customers – it’s fair to say it’s time to accept this is one area you need to take very seriously indeed!
Training Troubles
There’s no doubt that on-the-job training for customer service jobs isn’t good. Due to the high turnover of this type of work, it’s difficult to truly invest in getting the best out of a worker who has a high percentage chance of leaving your company. The result of this poor training is that you end up with a miserable member of staff, who is barely equipped to be able to handle the customer queries that it’s their job to deal with.
If you choose to invest in customer service training for your employees, you will reap the benefits over and over again. Not only do you have a better chance of ensuring those employees can keep your customers happy, but your staff will be more content too.
Customer Conundrums
Being yelled at and abused shouldn’t be part of the job for anyone, so why do we tolerate it for customer service representatives? You’ll even see people boasting online about how they “gave someone an earful”; ignorant of the fact that the person they were shouting at likely had nothing to do with their complaint.
You can fix this simply by having a policy that the moment a customer is rude or aggressive, the call is terminated. Let this be at the discretion of the customer service agents. Not only will this force customers to have to calm down to discuss their issue – making it more likely to be efficiently resolved – but it will remove a lot of the upset from the job for your staff.
Onus On Ownership
A complaint can quickly spiral out of control due to a lack of ownership. One department passes the complaint to another, and they pass it on to another, and soon everyone has lost control of it.
Try to prevent this happening by assigning every particular complaint or issue to a specific member of staff. They should be responsible for resolving it or – at the least – chasing up on how it’s progressing through other departments. This will help the customer feel happier and better listened to, and everyone should be able to solve their issue far quicker
