How to Develop Essential Customer Service Skills
Customer service is about so much more than putting on a smile. Here are the 6 most important practices for developing the customer service skills your agents need to have.
The arena of customer service has grown tremendously in just the last generation. Today, delighting your customers requires so much more than the age old “service with a smile.”
According to the 2015 State of Marketing Report, 86 percent of consumers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience, while nearly 90 percent would leave a company for its competitor after having a poor customer service experience. That means that for nearly 100 percent of your customers, customer service matters in a big way. Here’s how your agents can make sure to deliver the outstanding customer experience your target consumers are looking for.
1. Keep Your Cool
One of the trickiest skills of customer service is maintaining the resilience to bounce back after a negative interaction. Even the most skilled and amiable of contact centre agents is bound to have a bad interaction with a customer at some point. The trick is not to let that one interaction affect the ones that follow. Encourage your agents to keep their cool after each less-than-ideal interaction so that they don’t lose sight of the goal of delighting each customer that comes their way.
2. Foster a Positive Work Culture
Creating a great contact centre culture is one of the best ways to raise agent morale, to increase levels of production, and to maximize employee loyalty. It’s important to encourage your agents to have fun on the job with friendly competitions, games, and social bonding activities, but fostering a positive work culture doesn’t stop there. You also need to coach agents to bring out the best in their performance and help them develop a strong sense of ownership over their work. Help your agents set goals related to their job performance, and meet with them regularly to assess their progress.
3. Utilize the Right Tools
A contact centre that’s lacking in the right technology that could help agents outperform the competition will only end up with a frustrated team and low rates of customer satisfaction. Optimize your contact centre by prioritizing a multichannel customer experience that utilizes social media, live chat, SMS, voice, and automation while maintaining the ability to integrate channels in a seamless way.
4. Laugh It Off
Enough formal talk; one of the best ways to encourage your agents to keep a positive attitude is by infusing humor into your day-to-day work culture. Humor helps agents relax at work, which improves their ability to relate to customers on a personal level and make your customers smile. After all, what’s more important to customer service than making customers leave you in a better mood than they arrived in?
5. Encourage Agent Autonomy
Nothing sucks the joy out of a position like feeling as if you’re being micromanaged to a point that limits your potential. Your agents are on your team for a reason — after all, you hired them! Let your trust in their performance reflect in your capacity to relax the rules a bit and allow your agents to do what they need to do to please each customer. A little agent autonomy can bring out creative problem solving as your agents strive to delight your customers using means that you may not have thought of on your own.
6. Communicate
Communication skills can help maximize performance in almost any line of work. Contact centre managers need to communicate clear expectations and a strong mission to their employees. This helps to foster a strong work culture based on openness. In turn, agents must communicate openly and honestly with customers without sugarcoating or misrepresenting your company. By implementing these principles of communication into your contact centre culture, you can maximize performance and improve customer relationships.
Conclusion
Helping your agents to develop essential customer service skills isn’t only about pleasing your customers. It’s also about creating the right culture from the ground up that helps develop your agents into better employees who will assist in your company’s long-term growth. Keep a light-hearted attitude without sacrificing the importance of customer satisfaction so that agents are able to keep their cool while striving to achieve their customer service goals. Don’t underestimate the value of agent autonomy and effective communication, and remember to encourage your agents and customers to laugh things off every once in a while.
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