How to Deliver Excellent Customer Service During Lockdown
Right now, the world is in the middle of an uncertain time. The coronavirus pandemic has changed how the world operates with far-reaching consequences.
For businesses, these are challenging times, and with no comparable situation taking place in recent history, it has become necessary for business owners to think on their feet. Protecting your business and ensuring that it is sustainable for the future is a challenge that many business owners face now.
Navigating your way through the pandemic and making decisions that are in the best interests of your employees, your customers, and your company’s future is no easy task.
Providing your customers with the best possible service is essential right now. The difficulty is that workarounds are required to achieve this. Having most of your employees working from home instead of the office brings fresh challenges that you have probably never faced.
So, how do you deliver excellent customer service in these exceptional circumstances? Read on to find out…
Be Honest
Acknowledging these are challenging times and being open and honest with your customers is essential. Now more than ever before, people are more likely to appreciate that your business isn’t a faceless corporation; your employees are humans, each facing issues and concerns about the current circumstances.
Being open and reassuring your customers that you are trying your best is an essential part of keeping them in the loop and minimizing frustration that your service may be different for the time being.
Keep Communicating
Keeping your customers informed of how your business is responding to the pandemic is a great way to keep your communication clear and transparent. You can stay in touch with your customers by sending weekly or fortnightly emails to your subscribers.
This is also the ideal opportunity to reassure customers that you have taken measures to protect your staff. It isn’t necessary to bombard customers with emails relating to Covid-19, but reasonably regular updates are essential to show customers that you have not forgotten about them.
Increase in Staff Support
Unfortunately, your employees may face calls from frustrated customers right now. Dealing with an angry customer is never a pleasant experience for employees, especially if your employees are taking these calls in their own homes.
Being away from a supportive office environment and working alone at home can make it harder for employees to deal with these kinds of phone calls. Providing your employees extra support is vital for their well-being and will ensure they feel better equipped to offer high-quality customer service.
Providing your staff with extra rest breaks while they are working and encouraging them to speak out if they require additional support should help to keep morale up and protect employee wellbeing.
Additionally, if you’ve got a lot of calls coming in that your customers are having difficulty keeping up with, you could consider trying to lessen the load. There are several different call center models that you could use to support your business, and rather than having your employees try to tackle every customer complaint and call – call center professionals could be ready to pick up the phone in their place.
Additional Automation
Few things are more frustrating than being left on hold on a call. No one likes waiting in a queue to speak to a customer service advisor, so anything you can do to reduce the time your customers spend waiting in line on the phone will be useful.
To lower the volume of calls coming into your customer service operatives, it is a good idea to introduce automated systems that reduce the need for customers to phone your company in the first place. There are a few ways that you can do this. Firstly, harnessing artificial intelligence’s power and introducing chatbots to your website will help.
Chatbot pop-ups are an excellent way to get customers’ basic questions answered immediately without speaking to an employee. The second approach is to create additional content on your website which addresses common customer queries.
Explainer videos are an ideal way to communicate instructions to customers. Filming a video from scratch would be impossible at the moment while everyone is social distancing, but video post production makes it possible to create the content that you need right now from your stock video.
Using stock video is an excellent way to use existing content and provides a cost-effective workaround. Balancing the needs of your customers, staff, and business in these uncertain times is, without a doubt, a significant challenge.
However, handling the situation proactively will ensure that your customers continue to receive excellent customer service and will help reduce the pressure on your hard-working employees. Clear communication and clever workarounds are vital to getting through this unprecedented time.
