Homerun Nievera, Negosentro | Your interaction with customers forms the cornerstone of your business. Whether you’re talking about customer acquisition, order processing, conflict resolution, or even marketing you need to find out the best ways to interact with your unique customer base. The field of customer service is tremendously varied since customer service is defined by many experts in the following way: a company’s advice or helpful assistance to customers who purchase or use a company’s services and lineup of products.
Always Remain Open and Adaptable
Customer service should be courteous, knowledgeable, and consistently adaptable. The old saying about the customer always being right is a great guiding principle for answering the more nuanced questions like “How to improve customer satisfaction?”. Your customers are different enough at one point in time, but the needs of all or most of your customers can change dramatically from one year to the next. It’s important to keep abreast of all of these changes in customer tastes and expectations in order to be on the same page when it comes to offering a stellar customer service experience.
Be Empathetic and Search for a Win-Win Outcome
Treat the customer service project as a learning experience in the sense that you’ll constantly be finding out more information on your customers’ needs. In all reality, however, customer service is often more nuts-and-bolts than all of this in the sense that if a particular customer is experiencing a difficult problem, you need to be able to show both empathy and patience in mutually forging a solution that works for both sides. Although you’ll most likely be taking the lead on many of your interactions you should treat customer service as a collaborative process of collaboratively searching for a win-win outcome.
Consider Using Customer Relationship Management Software
Customer relationship management software is great because it allows you to better negotiate the customer service process and improve customer loyalty. Customer relationship management software puts a huge amount of data at your disposal and intelligently interprets that data for you so you can spend more time satisfying the needs of your customers in more personal face-to-face, phone, or email interactions. With CRM you can document and learn from previous customer interactions and even automate marketing and sales force processes. Customer relationship management software can tell you what’s working and allow you to market and respond accordingly with automated email marketing campaigns and on-point customer service.
Hard Work Has No Substitute
With all of this emphasis on automation you might be tempted to discount old-fashioned ingredients for success like hard work and dedication to one’s craft. As it turns out those are the ingredients most in-demand right now since customers often receive stock answers, or otherwise unsatisfying responses, from other customer service departments. To avoid that customers should feel that you’re working diligently to resolve their issues and that you have a full knowledge of the industry, current trends, and how your company fits into the picture. Your customer service representatives need to stay updated on broad industry trends as well as changes in your product lineup – whether that’s phasing out older products or innovating with new products and services.
Try to Remain Unruffled
Remember that your customer service is probably hearing from the more disgruntled section of your customer base. With that in mind your customer service representatives should be tactful, modest, and respectable even in the face of conflict. Your primary goal is to ask how you can best serve the customer and resolve this temporary issue that the customer is experiencing. It might not be a bad idea to give general advice on how to resolve popular issues in a FAQ section on your website or have your social media manager address these issues online before they become bigger issues. Remember, the customer is always right!
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Homerun Nievera is the publisher of Negosentro.com and WorldExecutivesDigest.com. He has interests in several tech and digital businesses as director and chief strategist.
Homerun is a digital evangelist, content marketer and lifelong learning advocate. Homerun is the “He Said” in the popular Facebook Page He Said, She Said. Email at ask@homernievera.com.
