Top 4 Mistakes in Customer Service
If previously only part of companies thought about improving the quality of service, now everyone should think about it, especially small businesses. After all, customers are becoming more and more demanding, and competition is growing. And in a world of a huge variety of companies with similar goods and services, we can only differ in one thing – service. This factor is important even for online companies, such as casinos offering a TonyBet welcome bonus. Let’s get to the main mistakes in customer service.
Lack of Service Standards
Customer service standards are the rules, the prescribed perfect model of interaction with the client. The standards describe exactly how the process of working with the customer is carried out, namely:
- How to meet a client and communicate with a potential customer.
- How to talk and consult with customers on the phone.
- How to write a letter to a client, and much more.
Competently developed standards, in addition to the rules, include practical tools: scripts, speech formulas, and phrases, examples of letters that employees will use in certain situations. This is a help for managers.
A company without service standards faces several problems:
- Employees act on instinct. Not all employees have developed communication skills. If there are no standards, employees will be guided by their understanding of service behavior, or at best, based on the model of behavior with customers of more experienced colleagues.
- Difficult to train new staff. Imagine a new employee comes into the company. How do you teach him or her the accepted rules of conduct with customers? In this case, standards are mandatory, containing a single set of rules, a list of common values that are binding for all.
- There is no unified level of competence. If there are no clear service standards, there is no system in the company, and therefore the level of service is different. It is good when the client is served by an experienced employee with the right understanding of the importance of service for the company. And if not? If there are no standards, the level of customer satisfaction with service depends on which manager leads it, but it shouldn’t be that way.
Customer satisfaction and the success of the company as a whole should not depend on the personality of the salesperson or manager. To prevent this, service standards should be developed if they do not exist, and the current standards should be reviewed regularly and updated as necessary.
Unspecified Business Processes
Business processes in the company should be described – first of all, those which bring profit to your company. As an example, take the customer service process in a restaurant. Draw it up, break it down into steps. You will see at once whether the process is logical or not, what operations are wasted time and why the customer may go to a competitor. On that basis, you can devise steps to improve the process.
Not Knowing Your Customer
Here we are talking not only about the target audience because we often understand who our clients are. It is a question of understanding our clients’ needs and desires. For example, a client calls an online furniture store. What are his needs?
It could be, for example:
- Proper consultation (telling about the product, its differences from similar items).
- Polite communication (polite and competent conversation).
- A clear course of action (a clear process for ordering and paying for the goods, delivery dates), etc.
What to do? The result should exceed the expectation, only then the customer will remain in your company. In other words, if the customer expects competent consultation and a customer-oriented attitude, but he is treated as if he distracts the manager from his work, it is not surprising if the customer will leave to a competitor.
Untrained Staff
Both business owners and managers should translate the perfect behavioral model with the client. A common mistake made by many companies is that standards have been developed but not implemented. That is, they exist for the sake of appearance, but it is not clear how to apply them in practice: there are rules, but they are written without reference to the company, without examples.
To solve this problem, you have to be creative. Any company can come up with its own system of low-budget training, which may include:
- Training internal mentors on accepted service standards. Mentors can be experienced managers or supervisors.
- Systematic meetings with analysis of telephone calls.
- Replenished knowledge base with useful articles and tools for improving customer service.
At first, it may seem that it’s impossible to correct these mistakes. But when you start doing this, you will understand that it’s not so hard.
