4 Things you should Understand about your Customer Service Team
As you already know, people are complicated. Psychology and business are a lot alike at their core as they both seek to explore and understand people’s needs, wants, choices and behaviors.
Every single one of your customers is an individual with different background, experiences, issues and mindsets. Whatever emotional or behavioral peculiarities these people come with, your customer service team will always be in the front line. No matter how great your product is or how talented your employees are, one of the things that customers are more likely to remember is the direct positive or negative interaction they have with your company. As a result, your customer service team is established as the front face of your company, and customers’ experiences will be defined by the quality of the support they receive.
Here you will find 4 elements which will help you better understand your customer service team and make everyone, from your employees to your customers, happy!
1. Good customer service is achieved with systems as well as smiles.
Any frontline employee can provide great customer service on an one-off or once-in-a-while basis. However, you can’t always rely on the occasion. In between, you need systems to ensure most things go right most of the time.
Having the best and most appropriate systems in place is very important to your customer service team. Nonetheless, your systems can only be brought to life through the efforts and emotional involvement of your employees.
2. You won’t be able to provide good customer service if you don’t hire the appropriate employees.
Hiring improperly and expecting great results are not two things that go together.
Below you will find some of the personality traits that make for a great customer-facing employee and they spell WETCO:
W is for Warmth: Human kindness. Warmth is perhaps the simplest and yet most fundamental of these five traits. In a nutshell, it means to enjoy our human commonality, flaws and all.
E is for Empathy: The ability to sense what another person is feeling. Empathy is one step up from warmth as it goes beyond the plateau of liking other people and is more like reading people and sensing what a customer needs, or wants, regardless of whether this desire is even yet apparent to the customer.
T is for Teamwork: Teamwork might be viewed as a slightly paradoxical member of the WETCO group of personality traits. After all, customers need the help of ambitious employees who will be in charge of the situation, people who are willing to fix a problem all by themselves if necessary. Nonetheless, that attitude needs to be experienced as the affection of a team approach, otherwise sooner or later your business will suffer from the disagreements that will evoke.
C is for Conscientiousness: Conscientiousness can be defined as detail orientation, including an ability and willingness to follow through completion. This trait is key for successfully supporting customers, and unfortunately it is not always found in those who are otherwise suited to a customer service department.
An employee can smile, empathize, and play well with the team, but if they can’t remember to follow through on the promises they have made to customers, they will most certainly kill your company’s image.
O is for Optimism: Optimism is necessary in customer-facing positions as it is the ability to take a step back and to not internalize challenges. Employees need to have a positive, optimistic self-image as well as to drive themselves forward in the reality of daily adversity.
3. Even after you have selected the people that will compose the customer service team you should be careful…
If you treat those people poorly, make them feel scared about their long-term prospects with you, and so forth, you will never be able to receive their best efforts and their extra efforts in customers’ support. Those extra efforts are really the ones that your business needs and the ones you can count on to provide an outstanding customer service and therefore, a promising customer experience.
4. Managing correctly your employees plays an important role in whether they will treat customers wonderfully.
It is not possible to predict every single thing in every situation that needs to be done for a customer. Employees need to have the freedom to do what’s best for the customer.
No matter how talented and emotionally appropriate an employee is for customer service work, improper or even nonexistent training, guidance or leadership automatically means that you are throwing away a potentially great resource.
Also published on Medium.