Customer Service refers to the interaction between a product or service and customers. The interactions may occur before, during, and after a sale. Customer Service is crucial for good customer loyalty. It ensures customer satisfaction and encourages repeat purchases. This adds value to a product or service.
70% of the customers will buy from you again if you resolve a complaint. Good customer service increases brand awareness by 170%, increases brand favorability by 500%, increases purchase intent by 270%.
Customer service applies in all the industries. So, whatever you are, an e-commerce startup or big MNC, customer service really helps. Customer service increases the probability of selling to a new customer by 20%.
38% of consumers say that they love personalisation. 78% if consumers have bailed on a transaction due to poor service. 82% of consumers say it takes a lot of time to reach a live agent. 90% of customers say that small shops place a greater emphasis on customer service than large companies.
59% of customers would try a new brand or company for a better service experience. 50% of customer service agents fail to answer customer’s questions. 70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated.
You could lose a million dollars tomorrow if your biggest client walked out of the door. It could cost your company up to $300,000 if you lost a highly-skilled tech employee.
Benefits of Training Your Staff for Customer Services
1. Relationship Building Skills
After completing training, team members can get along better so they can work together and get things done. They take care of customers and each other. With a unique focus on relationships as a key component of customer service, your team members will learn relationship skills.
They can use these skills with customers and coworkers. Relationship building skills include knowing how to disagree, how to deliver bad news, how to say no without alienating the other person, and how to manage emotions in the workplace, among other skills.
2. Faster Ticket Resolution
Good customer service skills build trust. When customers trust service providers, they are more likely to report problems sooner. Thus, speeding the resolution process. They’re also more likely to accept changes in software equipment, and policies, especially security policies.
When coworkers trust each other, they are more likely to work well together, accept new ideas, and support each other. All of this leads to faster problem resolution.
3. Happier Customers
Customer Service Training helps the learner find powerful new ways to focus on delivering a great customer experience. Through empathy training, compassion training, and better listening training, your team members learn how to avoid the most common customer complaints while delivering an outstanding customer experience.
It costs more to acquire new customers than it does to retain them. Excellent customer service training ensures excellent customer service which leads to happy customers and strong customer loyalty.
4. Boosts Morale
One of the benefits of training your staff for customer service is that it boosts their morale. This results in reduction of turnover costs. Customer service employees love to effectively and quickly help your customers.
After all, if they can make the customer happy, it means they have done a good job. On the other hand, no one likes to be the bearer of bad news or be at the receiving end of an angry rant from a displeased customer.
Providing your customer staff with the proper tools and training to solve any issue a customer might face is the key to boosting their morale and reducing employee turnover.
An employee turnover can be very expensive. This also goes beyond your customer service staff and applies to all employees. Infact, people don’t like to work for companies with a negative reputation or that are flooded with negative reviews and criticism.
5. Adds Value To The Brand
When you provide proper training to your customer service staff then they are able to provide a positive experience to customers. When a customer has positive experiences which turn into a positive company reputation which turns into a positive workforce.
This workforce is then motivated to work harder and offer even better customer service experiences. All of this occurs while boosting your revenue from happy customers. Overtime, your brand name will be synonymous with positive experiences, increasing its value.
This can be advantageous when launching new products, expanding into new industries or evaluating the company for investors. If you keep thinking about it, you can probably find more ways in which proper training can snowball and have a great impact on a company’s revenue.
6. Increases Customer Retention
Training your customer service staff will increase customer retention and recurring revenue. This is because it’s always cheaper to retain a current customer than to acquire a new one.
Therefore providing good customer service is an effective way to keep your customers coming back and purchasing your products. Customer retention is cheaper and more effective than advertising and marketing to people who don’t even know about you in the first place.
Every customer that decides to stay in business with you is also one less customer leaving and doing business with your competitors.
7. Generate Positive Reviews
What’s the first thing a customer might do when they have a negative customer service experience with your business? Read a negative Facebook post tagging your brand, a one star review for the world to see or worse, a full blown blog post that might appear on Google when people search for your business.
Not only are these scenarios preventable, but you can turn them around into positive reviews and posts by providing each of your customers with great customer service. Great customer service can only be possible when your staff has gone through proper customer service training.
Even when a customer has already left a one-star review, following up and assisting them further can be what they need to turn that one into a five.
5 Critical Mistakes that Customer Service Staff Makes.
- We Seem Like We Don’t Care
Support situations can fail when we don’t sound or act as if we care or are concerned. Maybe you actually do care but in order to convey our care, we have got to choose compassionate and empathetic words and phrases that show we care.
No one can read another’s mind, try saying things like “I know this is very frustrating or I am sure I would feel the same if I were you” or “If anything at all I could do, believe me I would”. Make sure you use your own words.
Try an honest expression of sympathy like “I’m so sorry that it happened to you”. It’s amazing how much of a calming effect that can have.
- We Don’t Listen
Too often we try to jump in with solutions and we don’t allow our end users and customers to finish describing their problems or venting their feelings. We need to show the customer or end user that we are listening by what we say and how we say.
Understand that obnoxious users and customers are often embarrassed because they made a mistake and want to blame it on someone. Showing that we are interested in what they have to say often helps us establish rapport with the customer.
Active listening, including asking to make sure we understand what they have said, can go a long way toward fostering a good situation. By saying, “Let me make sure I understand what you said”, we are reaching out to our customer showing that we care and showing that we actually are listening.
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We Let the User Upset Us
It’s easy to allow the customers or users’ attitude to irritate or annoy us. Our customers pick up on this through our tone of voice and use of language or our silence. This can fan the fire.
We can make a personal challenge to see how many upset users and customers we can turn around. Don’t take upset users and customers ranting and raving personally. It’s critical for success in emotionally-charged support situations. Don’t get emotionally hooked.
When we let users and customers push our buttons, we lose. When we respond emotionally with anger, sarcasm or blame, we can’t respond rationally. When things heat up, we can cool off by saying that we need to research the situation and possible solutions and ask if we can get back to the user or a customer at a later time.
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We Use Wrong Words
Some trigger words can cause users and customers to become more difficult. Some of these are “Can’t”, “You’ll have to”. Be sure to offer users and customers an alternative choice to provide users and customers some say in how they want to proceed.
Instead of saying “I don’t know”, try “Let me get you to answer” or “Let me find out for you”. Be careful about tentative language such as “I think” when answering customer’s questions.
Customers don’t want to hear speculations about answers to their questions. They want straight answers or an assurance that will get them an accurate and complete answer.
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We Focus on Ourselves, Instead of Seeing It From the Customer’s Point of View
Sometimes we might think our customers are making too much out of a small issue. If the issue seems like a big deal to the customers or end-user, it is a big deal.
Regardless of how we might feel about it, we must always look at the customer or end-user issues from their perspective.No matter what, it is a big deal for our users and customers and they want us to acknowledge that.
Important Customer Service Training Tips
- Make sure your team understands the importance of good phone skills, including a positive attitude, speaking clearly to be understood and active listening. They need to listen carefully to the caller and interact to ensure they understand the caller’s issue.
- Give “Thank You Notes”, these notes matter because they show appreciation to the customer and so few people bother to send them. Take a moment and send a ‘thank you’ email.
- Empathy is your ability to feel what your customer is going through, or if you simply can’t relate, to try to imagine what they are going through based on their life experiences. Customer service training must emphasise sympathy for the other person.
- Anyone who works in customer service has stories about tough customers who affected their attitude. Explain that your attitude is entirely under your control. You can choose to be positive and uplifting or you can choose to be a downer.
- Remind your team of the importance of offering alternatives when they have to say no. They might be able to present an acceptable alternative themselves or they can escalate the issue to a manager or higher-level support team.
- There is no place for complacency. You’ve got to continuously hone your skills. Talk about the personal benefits to the individual of faster ticket resolution, greater value to the company, and personal pride.
- A key component of customer service is improving your listening skills. That means learning to listen to understand and remember what the other person is saying. It means using active listening techniques. It means listening in a way that makes the other person feel respected and dignified.
- You show you care through your use of the five principles : Competence, Compassion, Empathy, Good Listening and Treating people with dignity and respect. In customer service training, teach your customers to practice the five principles as much as possible.
- Treating people with dignity and respect means your manners, saying please and thank you, being on time, honouring boundaries, speaking well of your team, and avoiding whining, complaining, and making excuses.
- Learn to use generally accepted business grammar, spelling, and style in your emails, texting, and chat messages. Be sure to review customer emails before responding to ensure you have answered all their questions.
- Remember that your customers are probably doing many other tasks at the same time as they are chatting with you. Be respectful of your time by avoiding unnecessary small talk unless the customer initiates it.
