Learn To Make Customer Service Improvements

The best way to ensure lasting results from a customer service initiative is with a comprehensive, organized approach, if you have the option. Which is why, in customer service consulting and among customer experience consultants, they always recommend you first work on getting your framework right, before going forward and working on the procedures.

Overhaul Your Hiring Practices: This is also one you’re not going to overhaul today, literally speaking.  But you can push toward overhauling them today.  And there’s no other place you can start that will make more of a difference.  Do you hire scientifically, or do you hire like you spice your food–a bit of salt, a bit of pepper, a bit of whimsy and gut feeling here and there… if you hire haphazardly, the results you’ll get are haphazard. 

Tattoos, Hair Restrictions and Piercings: ease up on these or get rid of them today.  Employees with great customer-facing potential do not apply for work looking a particular way.  They have something particular in their heart, their minds, their aptitudes, and potential. Don’t limit yourself to people who look a particular way.  The other reason such restrictions are a problem is this:  If an employee can’t, even a little bit, be themselves on the job, you can’t expect them to deliver genuine customer service.  Which is what customers today, more than ever, are looking for.

Phone Manners:  Do you have customer interaction standards for telephone communications?  You don’t?  Then that’s where you should start.  Great companies have very specific telephone and customer interaction standards (although they allow great latitude in how they are interpreted).  If you’re just winging it on the phone, it’s time to work on that.

Listen to the stories that managers and employees tell around your company: are they sabotaging your attempts at a customer-centered culture? Are the stories you hear around the office often centered on how customers tried to take advantage, and how you stopped those customers dead in their tracks?  They shouldn’t be. They should be stories that go in the opposite direction:  about how you went the extra mile, or a coworker went the extra mile, to help a customer in a creative way. Otherwise, you can do all the mission-statement preaching you want, but employees will know where you really stand: in opposition to your customers. 

Start having a daily customer service meeting, just 5 or 10 minutes long.  Start this tradition today. Don’t start it today, start it as soon as you can get buy-in from the people in your company who will have to support this process over the weeks and years.  But it’s a crucial part of getting your team on the same page and keeping them there.   Have a different employee each day discuss a different tenet of your customer service philosophy and customer service issues that come up.  In the course of a year, the amount of training you’ll get in is extraordinary, as well as greatly enhancing your team spirit.  

Is your company looking for customer service solutions to help you deal with customer interaction? SMART Service Desk IT Service Management Software is your answer. We know that your satisfied customers will return again and again. Let us help you increase productivity, reduce operations cost and improve customer experience with our ITIL compliant solutions. No matter the size of your business we have your customer retention solutions.

SMART Service Desk
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Chandler Arizona 85225
602-235-0975
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