What is Customer Service? Customer service is the service provided to customers before, during and after purchasing and using goods and services.
Good Customer service provide a great experience to the customers and also meet their expectations. When you provide excellent customer service, not only you sell the goods or services, you also highly retaining the customers to come back to you again for other services or goods in the future and possibly gaining new referrals from the present customers. And most importantly, because you are the first point of contact with the customers hence you are representing the organization and creating a professional image of the company to the customers. So now we know what is good customer service, what are the qualities to be develop to have effective customer service?
Communication skills with customers is a must to provide effective customer service. Communication means the way you present to the customers, the active listening you give to the customers and know their needs and wants and also the kind of feedback you provided to them.
Product knowledge is be a hard skill that it can be learn with proper training. With good product knowledge, you will then give customers the confident of the products and services that the company is providing. This is because when you know your product well enough, you can present it to them confidently and also whatever questions the customers have, you will be able to provide the correct answers and not leaving them having any doubts.
Human Touch – as customer service, majority knows that we do have a scripts to follow in presenting the products or services and if we relies too much on the paper, the result is that we become too ‘robotic’ which many customers do not like to have and they will know that the agent is following a script and not sincere enough in listening to the customers. We must adopt ‘say it with feeling’ approach which we give a natural speech with politeness and professionalism. Customers will definitely prefer this way because from a communication perspective, they will feel heard and understood.
Internal Customers – Internal customers are third parties (diff departments or vendors) or colleagues. Many have the concept that customer service is only provided to external customers but is not cause in fact everyday we are providing customer service to everyone that we meet daily as when we present, we are selling ourselves. Although communicating with internal customers will be less formal but we still need to maintain a certain level of respect, politeness, pleasant and friendly manner.
To the customer, the customer service agent is the company. So to serve the customer it is important to have the right Customer Service Mindset.
Not you but the solution – We always want to help the customers but wanting to help is not necessarily helpful in itself. When we say we will try or do our best, we want to show the customer that we really care. But ultimately, the customer wants to hear is not that we are trying so hard or we will do our best but what they want is solution/resolution or alternative to their questions. If we focus on that solution rather than we will do our best, then our focus is where it should be, on the customer.
Customer’s shoes – Put yourself in customer’s shoes which mean that we show empathy and understanding their concerns, frustrations and challenges. Always give the customers the perspective that we are willingly to help and find the solutions for them.
What is In it for me – means that do you have the necessary product knowledge or communication to assist the customers and provide them with a solutions? Is the methods use to communicate with customers really useful via email or telephone? Or are we overly apologies and feel sorry for the customers? In conclusion, customers always want a solution to their problem.
Extra Mile – always ask yourself is there anything more that you can do that would be helpful to the customer? Explain the 3 Es – Elementary, Expected and Exceeding – you must always aim for exceeding, for example not only you fulfill the customer’s queries in a given time, you also will require to follow up on it. Or even if you are not the correct department for the customer’s question, you can always provide him/her with the direction to where they can seek help for.
Customer Experience – is about ensuring consistent customer satisfaction and continuous improvement in the company goods and services so it can further grow and drive the business.
Through the quality of the products and product innovation
In the way we listen, understand and respond to the customers’ need
In the way we strengthen customer relationships based on trust and retain them to continue using our products and services
By giving customer a positive experience each time they contact us for queries