4 Essential Steps to Providing World-Class Customer Service
Every business that aspires to long-term prosperity needs to focus its efforts not only on providing desirable and high-quality products or services but also ensuring that it offers impeccable customer service.
Today, the internet not only offers customers more choice than ever before of whom to do business with, but it also serves as a global forum upon which customers can publicise their experiences - both good and bad - of dealing with companies. Even in such a competitive environment, many organisations continue to provide poor or inadequate customer service without realising that this could be the decisive factor in the failure of their business.
Expert business skills training provider Maguire Training can help every business to attract and retain customers, thanks to their practical and informative course 'Excellent Customer Service'. Delegates learn the factors that constitute customer service excellence and gain practical insights and strategies which will help them to build lasting and beneficial customer relationships, handle customers with confidence and promote positive customer service behaviours.
To help businesses start down the path of providing reputation-enhancing and customer-delighting service, Maguire Training shares with you 4 essential steps to providing world-class customer service:
Step 1: Make yourself easily available to customers
Whether to praise you, ask questions, obtain product information or (knock on wood) lodge a complaint, it is vital that customers can get in contact with you quickly and easily through a range of different channels. Whether they contact you via email, telephone, an enquiry form on your website or through social media, such as a LinkedIn page, your customer service strategy should ensure that they receive a timely and appropriate response which fully addresses their reason for getting in touch with you.
Step 2: Always employ the human touch when dealing with customers
The simple truth is that people like dealing with people. If a customer has taken the trouble to get in touch with you, the best way to frustrate them is by forcing them to navigate an automated and complex telephone menu system which ultimately places them in a lengthy queue or by sending them an impersonal and non-specific 'auto-respond' email.
Interacting with customers at a personal and human level, whether over the phone or via an online 'live chat' system is an excellent way to build customer rapport and get to the heart of their requirements or issues, enabling you to find the perfect solution for them. Employing the personal touch and demonstrating warmth, friendliness and helpfulness can be all it takes to delight your customers and earn recommendations to their family and friends for your business.
Step 3: Be knowledgeable and competent
One of the greatest contributors to customer service excellence is the ability to provide precisely what the customer needs at their first point of enquiry. To do this, customer service representatives should know their company and the products and services they sell inside out and should be empowered to take the necessary action to resolve customer problems and queries with minimum fuss and delay.
Ensuring that customer-facing employees receive appropriate training and have access to resources that will help them become more competent in their role will, in turn, ensure that they are able to provide increasingly higher standards of customer service.
Step 4: Be proactive and 'go the extra mile'
Reaching out to customers and keeping them informed of things that they need to know is another way of demonstrating that you have their best interests at heart.
It is far better to proactively contact customers to inform them in advance that your product or service is changing, is currently out of stock or to tell them that your online ordering system will be offline for maintenance, rather than leaving them to find out the hard way.
Proactivity is also about pre-empting customers' needs and identifying and addressing any areas of your business that might negatively impact the customer experience, such as slow product delivery, broken links on your website, an overly complicated or expensive returns procedure.
In the twenty-first century, no organisation can afford to sacrifice profitable business due to poor customer service and there is no valid excuse for doing so.
Maguire Training can provide everything a company needs to enable it to provide outstanding customer service. For the additional convenience of delegates, the benefits of 'Excellent Customer Service' can be obtained either as a conventional on-site course or as online training, accessible at any time from an internet-connected PC or device and delivered courtesy of Maguire Training's versatile E-learning platform.
