One-Two Punch Combination of Customer Service

While it’s easy to emphasize the importance of good customer service, most organizations fail to re-emphasize its importance as a core strategy.

The result? Low sales, lost and disgruntled customers and eventually, a failing organization.

So the main question is, what can business owners do in order to improve their customer service? The answer to this is a two-step process listed as follows:

1. Ensure that the entire team is trained in delivering excellent customer service.
2. Reinforce the expectations of customer service, consistently, amongst the team.

Taking the first step into account, your entire team should be trained to deliver exceptional customer service. This includes ensuring customers that their concerns are valid, how to talk to them and the terms to use/avoid etc. However, it does not end here. The lessons need to be reinforced consistently to ensure consistent quality customer care across all departments.

Once the team has been trained and your reminders are set and consistent regarding the exceptional standards of customer service that are required, you must ensure that all the employees of your team are trained in the same manner. Once the entire team is one the same page they can work with relative ease.

In order to get every employee accustomed to the high level of commitment to customer service, you should train them immediately. If the new team is not trained in line with your expectations then there is a good chance that the business will suffer. However, this can be avoided with constant reminders/training sessions.

Remember that there is no room for second place. Anything that falls short of the best in terms of customer service is your fault.  This is because it signifies that their training is not complete.  Other reasons which might point the finger in your direction are that you don’t have the proper system to monitor customer feedback, or that you have not reinforced training effectively or perhaps that the system in place is inefficient or maybe because you haven’t fired someone in a while.  If the standards of excellent customer service are not met by your business then its potential for sustainability or profitability will diminish.

The fact is that if your goal is to provide nothing short of the best customer service than there might come a time where you may fall short of this promise. However, even with that standard your customer service will be far better than that of the competitors. Also when you are fond of providing excellent service to your customer, you might be forgiven easily for failing at times.

Some disappointed customers tend to leave without leaving feedback or getting their issue resolved. Unfortunately, most turn to other services (read your competitors). It is therefore important that you train your team to ensure they remain on the ball regardless of the type of complaint or client query they receive. Plus, have systems in place to monitor and ensure these standards.